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"The unrecognized genius-that's one old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one-the genius recognized too well?"
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"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 Ayn Rand

"It was as if a volcano were cracking open, yet the people at the foot of the mountain ignored the sudden fissures, the black fumes, the boiling trickles, and went on believing that their only danger was to acknowledge the reality of these signs."

"Well, whose opinion did you take? "I don't ask for opinions." "What do you go by?"Judgment. "Well, whose judgment did you take? "Mine. "But whom did you consult about it?". "Nobody."

"Every form of happiness if one, every desire is driven by the same motor-by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence-and every achievement is an expression of it."

"The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach."

"Dagny leaned back in her chair. The short sentence was a shock. It was not merely relief: it was the sudden realization that nothing else was necessary to guarantee that it would be done; she needed no proofs, no questions, no explanations; a complex problem could rest safely on three syllables pronounced by a man who knew what he was saying."

"It takes two to make a very great career: the man who is great, and the man-almost rarer-who is great enough to see greatness and say so."

"I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind-and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression."
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