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Art Quotes
"This is one of the greatest challenges of our time: to convert ourselves to a type of development that knows how to respect creation."
36
"Instead of art I have taught philosophy. Though technique for me is a big word, I never have taught how to paint. All my doing was to make people to see."
36
"Poems are lenses, mirrors, and X-ray machines."
36
"The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies."
36
"Politicians are masters of the art of deception."
36
"Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite - getting something down."
36
"The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting."
36
"The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech."
36
"The painted aircraft took on sunlight and pulse. Sweeps of color, bands and spatters, airy washes, the force of saturated light-the whole thing oddly personal, a sense of one painter's hand moved by impulse and afterthought as much as by epic design. I hadn't expected to register such pleasure and sensation. The air was color-scrubbed, coppers and ochers burning off the metal skin of the aircraft to exchange with the framing desert."
36
"We can all be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin. . .if the question is, how do you make a poem by Pushkin?- or, what exactly makes one poem or painting or piece of music greater than another?- or, what is beauty?, or liberty?, or virtue?- if the question is, how should we live?. . . then, reason gives no answer or different answers. So something went wrong. The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist . . ."
36
"A commission of haberdashers could alone have reported whatthe rest of her poor dress was made of, but it had a strong generalresemblance to seaweed, with here and there a gigantic tea-leaf.Her shawl looked particularly like a tea-leaf after long infusion."
36
"When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies."
36
"My friend Kate once went to a concert of Mongolian throat singers who were traveling through New York City on a rare world tour. Although she couldn't understand the words to their songs, she found the music almost unbearably sad. After the concert, Kate approached the lead Mongolian singer and asked, "What are your songs about?" He replied, "Our songs are about the same things that everyone else's songs are about: lost love, and somebody stole your fastest horse."
36
"There was this tendency to drift. And yet when she thought about it, what did she really want to do? Or be? She had given up dancing-the dance-because it was too demanding, because it required an almost total devotion which she was unwilling to give. The cruelest art."
36
"A film that is a true work of art transcends theatre and heartwarmingly changes lives."
36
"The artist cannot hold back; it is impossible, because writing, or any other discipline of art, involves participation in suffering, in the ills and the occasional stabbing joys that come from being part of the human drama."
36
"She considered him further and decided he could definitely pass for a pirate. No, she thought, correcting herself. More like a sea captain, a younger version of the captain from that old movie where the pretty woman rents an old sea captain's house only to find the place haunted by the sea captain himself.She let out a heavy breath. Man, she loved that movie."
35
"Many Japanese painters and calligraphers would change their names intentionally to keep their relationship to the art always fresh. This way, others' expectations can be avoided."
35
"Books minister to our knowledge, to our guidance, and to our delight, by their truth, their uprightness, and their art."
35
"You have to master not only the art of listening to your head, you must also master listening to your heart and listening to your gut."
35
"When I started working with mirrors, it seemed to be the perfect material to stand in for that waiting."
35
"At that time, the academic orientation was rather technical contrary to that of the university, where art theory is very important. The teachers were renowned artists and among the best of that time."
35
"I just want to be written about as a normal artist."
35
"There was once a time when art history and film were basically the same medium, but art history is frozen in late-19th-century technology that has survived into the early 21st century."
35
"The '20s ended in an era of extravagance, sort of like the one we're in now. There was a big crash, but then the country picked itself up again, and we had some great years. Those were the days when American believed in itself. I was happy and proud to be painting it."
35
"I don't think that jazz, as any kind of an art form, has any permanence attached to it, apart from the practitioners of it."
35
"I feel uncomfortable with the term public art, because I'm not sure what it means. If it means what I think it does, then I don't do it. I'm not crazy about categories."
35
"Statesmanship is harder than politics. Politics is the art of getting along with people, whereas statesmanship is the art of getting along with politicians."
35
"And that Newman wasn't, and yet to me Pollock is just as radical and unlike Expressionism as Newman."
35
"When the impulses which stir us to profound emotion are integrated with the medium of expression, every interview of the soul may become art. This is contingent upon mastery of the medium."
35
"Art is magic... But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic."
35
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