top of page
Exlpore more Art quotes

"The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

"And it seemed at last that there were two musics progressing at one time before the seat of IlAovatar, and they were utterly at variance. The one was deep and wide ad beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow from which its beauty chiefly came."

"One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin."

"Art and the artist meet in stages, slowly revealing themselves until both are satisfied with what the other has become."

"A picture is a voiceless poem, a poem is a vocal picture."

"It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around."

"When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines."
Explore more quotes by John Sayles

"If you write a movie for Roger Corman, it's going to get made. You saw it almost the next day."

"I figured, 'When is that ever going to happen again?'. So I basically set out the opposite way movies are made; I set out with a budget first. I said, 'What can I do well for $40,000?'."

"Those are fun, especially if they're going to shoot them in four weeks, because you know they're not going to mess with anything you do, so it can be very imaginative."

"Fahrenheit 9/11 took public domain information that should have been on the news every night and put it in a film that a lot of people went to see. But still Bush has never had to answer those charges."

"There was a widespread indignation in the American media. They were saying, 'How can you make a movie during an election that's about politics? What are you doing? Are you trying to influence people's lives?' To which my response was, 'Well, I hope so.'"

"You get to say, 'Here's my philosophical idea about what the costume should like,' and the costume designer comes and gives you choices and sometimes they're all good, and I say, 'What do you think?' and they pick the right thing."

"I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, 'Okay, you fall off the horse this time.'"

"I always feel that there are no final victories and no final defeats. But it's true that America is in a hole right now. There are a lot of dead fish in the water."

"My argument has always been that this is not an anti-Bush film, it's a pro-democracy film. And if Bush comes out on the wrong side of democracy, that's his problem."
bottom of page