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Art Quotes
"Though the artist must remain master of his craft, the surface, at times raised to the highest pitch of loveliness, should transmit to the beholder the sensation which possessed the artist."
Art,
19
"I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful."
19
"One has complexes. One has the art complex. One goes to the School of Fine Arts and catches the complexes."
19
"Magic is the most interesting art because people not necessarily want to learn to paint after they see a great painting, but they want to learn magic after they see a great magic effect."
19
"In the novelist's profession, as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics' praise serve as outward standards for accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matter. What's crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you've set for yourself. Failure to reach that bar is not something you can easily explain away. When it comes to other people, you can always come up with a reasonable explanation, but you can't fool yourself. In this sense, writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike."
19
"Then, as tonight, he had felt lonely, but soon had learnt the bounty of such loneliness. The music had breathed to him its message, to him alone amongst these ordinary folk, whispered its gentle secret. And now the star. Across the shoulders of these people a voice was speaking to him in a tongue that he alone could understand"."
18
"An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination."
18
"There is no higher or purer pleasure than to sit with closed eyes and hear a naturally expressive voice recite... a play of Shakespeare's."
18
"We want people to experience art and think about it. The art reflects our time, it is about our culture."
18
"Art is a liaison between some sort of deranged mentality and others who are not going through it."
Art,
18
"To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote 'King Lear."
18
"A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words."
18
"If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist."
18
"You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul."
18
"Our erected wit maketh us to know what perfection is."
18
"I made this [letter] very long, because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter."
18
"The hidden child wants to be able to participate and to co-create in art, rather than being simply an admiring viewer."
18
"The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough."
18
"Dramatic. A well developed sense of the dramatic has values beyond what people usually imagine. One of these is to realise the limitations of a sense of the dramatic."
18
"A piece of wall can be visually disintegrated from the whole into a separate triangle by plunging a diagonal of light from edge to edge on the wall; that is, side to floor, for instance."
18
"But in Christianity, by contrast, the freedom of the children of God was also freedom from all important worldly interests, from all art and science, etc."
17
"A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair, and some great stories have neither."
17
"When it happens that I am more moved by the song than the thing which is sung, I confess that I sin in a manner deserving punishment."
17
"A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual."
17
"Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days, the region of pure poetry."
17
"And since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art."
17
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