top of page
.png){kind=small}
Art Quotes
"I swear that girl was born with a pen in her hand, the moon in her hair, and stars in her soul."
8
"All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful."
8
"The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and over-emphasis. Compromise is its second name."
8
"I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real, to see day lilies and swimming pools, loyalty and devotion, even though my eyes were closed, and all that surrounded me was a darkened room. I wrote because that was who I was at the core, and if I was too damaged to walk around the block, I was lucky all the same. Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed anything was possible."
8
"The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness. The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle. The creative urge lives and grows in him like a tree in the earth from which it draws its nourishment."
8
"Music is an art that expresses the inexpressible. It rises far above what words can mean or the intelligence define. Its domain is the imponderable and impalpable land of the unconscious."
8
"When ideas come I write them when they don't come I don't."
8
"Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!"
8
"Speed is not always a constituent to great work, the process of creation should be given time and thought."
8
"The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money."
8
"I've only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel."
8
"She watched him take the trumpet from its case and fit the mouthpiece. She watched as he raised it to his lips and then, so suddenly, from that tiny cup of metal against his flesh, the sound would burst out like a glorious, brilliant knife dividing the air. And the little room would reverberate and the flies, jolted out of their torpor, would buzz round and round as if riding the swirling notes."
8
"How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually."
8
"I always thought writing was the foundation and the basis for journalism in the same way being able to draw is the foundation for art."
8
"I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it."
8
"Instead of just recording reality photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism."
8
"If the painter has clumsy hands, he will be apt to introduce them into his works, and so of any other part of his person, which may not happen to be so beautiful as it ought to be. He must, therefore, guard particularly against that self-love, or too good opinion of his own person, and study by every means to acquire the knowledge of what is most beautiful, and of his own defects, that he may adopt the one and avoid the other."
8
"When a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it wasthis very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art."
8
"Boomer had asked her once, in a telephone call from Virginia, "Why does this stuff, these hand-painted hallucinations that don't do nothin' but confuse the puddin' out of a perfectly reasonable wall, why does it mean so much to you? It was a poor connection, but he could have sworn he heard her say, "In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak."
8
"The Beautiful is always strange."
8
"Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live."
8
"Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing."
8
"The greatest happiness is when the eye discovers beauty where neither then mind conceived of nor the hand intended any."
8
"There is something particularly fascinating about seeing places you know in a piece of art - be that in a film, or a photograph, or a painting."
8
"Writing isn't something you do because you feel like it. You never feel like it. You write because there's a rat in your brain chewing up the spirals of your DNA and you want to get the words down before they disappear."
8
"A poet is an artist that paints pictures by mixing thought, imagination, and emotion with words."
8
"Conception, my boy, fundamental brain work, is what makes all the difference in art."
7
"Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come."
7
"Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully."
7
bottom of page