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Art Quotes
"Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination."
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"Anyone who thinks the art of conversation is dead ought to tell a child to go to bed."
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"Our best teachers do more than impart facts and figures - they inspire and encourage students and instill a true desire to learn. That's a fine art in itself."
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"The art of biography is different from geography. Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps."
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"So I am totally aware that when I defend the autonomy of art I'm going counter to my own development. It's more an instinctive reaction, meant to protect the private aspect of the work, the part I am most interested in and which nowadays is at risk in our culture."
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"Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness."
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"My studio was on 9th Street between University and Broadway."
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"You can't expect to take a definitive image in half an hour. It takes days, often years."
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"The system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the System. The visual aspect can't be understood without understanding the system. It isn't what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance."
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"When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it."
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"This is just the beginning of a new era for America's workers."
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"Artists teach critics what to think. Critics repeat what the artists teach them."
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"If it weren't for me, she wouldn't have to take jobs like this. She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar. I felt my guilt like a brand.... I had seen girls clamor for new clothes and complain about what their mothers made for dinner. I was always mortified. Didn't they know they were tying their mothers to the ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners?"
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"I was brought up on art. My father thought I had a great hand at art and sent me to art school. But he did not want me to become a photographer."
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"Perhaps this is the purpose of all art, all writing, on the murders, fiction and non-fiction: Simply to participate."
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"The key to high concept is that fresh twist. Make it a big one. Wow your reader. Force her to gasp when she comes to that part in your story."
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"Its Vermeer'Kat turned to the boy who lingered in the doorway. 'It's stolen''What can I say?' Hale eased behind her and studied the painting over her shoulder. 'I met a very nice man who bet me he had the best security system in Istanbul.' His breath was warm on the back of her neck. 'He was mistaken."
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"Such meeting reveal that which we all darkly suspect about those whose art we have loved: that they are unlikely to be whatever it is we imagine them to be."
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"The scene is France. The theater is the world."
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"We have wasted our spirit in the regions of the abstract and general just as the monks let it wither in the world of prayer and contemplation."
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"To unlock the writer's block is to keep writing until you can unknot the "not". If you cannot, then put a can in the plot and unwrap it a lot!"
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"One performer whose band played my music better than I could myself was Art Farmer. He recorded 'Sing Me Softly of the Blues' and 'Ad Infinitum'."
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"When I spoke, I was listened to; and I was at a loss to know how I had so easily acquired the art of commanding attention, and giving the tone to the conversation."
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"To me that's what art is about - when you don't really have any control over your desires to do it."
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"When Socrates was about 30, and his father was long dead, he was still pursuing the art of sculpture, but from necessity, and without much inclination."
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"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."
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"An artist who conforms to conventional ideas is nothing but a mere charlatan."
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"Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live."
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"I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly and language became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language... I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again. I would conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent cries. It still was not right. But what exactly was 'it? 'It was something elusive, darkly shrouded for fear of being usurped, profaned. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless."
34
"But singing isn't just about belting it out, is it? It's not just who has the most wobble or the highest note, no, it's about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a song, the soul of it, so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don't you want to feel something real rather than just having your poor earholes bashed in?"
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"Actors are the only honest hypocrites."
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