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Art Quotes
"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"."
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"Our moments are music, and sometimes " just sometimes " we can catch them and put them into some lasting form. If we didn't have music, I don't think we could ever be truly happy, and if we didn't have special moments, we would never find music."
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"There was something about words and music together that allowed people to get nearest to honest truth about what was most difficult to say. Paradoxically, only through the essential instantaneity of music could you approach its eternal pertinence."
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"I would love to write a mystery - a romantic, funny mystery."
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"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."
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"A poem is its own name and cover."
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"We want people to experience art and think about it. The art reflects our time, it is about our culture."
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"I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences."
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"There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts - decoration of surfaces and bodies - appears to be a human universal."
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"For most people, art is only valuable if other people say it is; and artists are only worthwhile if they are either rich and famous, or dead."
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"The highest prize we can receive for creative work is the joy of being creative. Creative effort spent for any other reason than the joy of being in that light filled space, love, god, whatever we want to call it, is lacking in integrity. . ."
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"Now that a full flood of music has swept over our country, let Nikhil practise his scales, while we rouse the land with our cracked voices."
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"Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose of my art. The other half must be to tell my story in the most honest way that I can."
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"We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art."
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"Of course Tucker Crowe was in pain when he made [the record], but he couldn't just march into a recording studio and start howling. He'd have sounded mad and pathetic. He had to calm the rage, tame it and shape it so that it could be contained in the tight-fitting songs. Then he had to dress it up so that it sounded more like itself."
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"We must grant the artist his subject his idea his donnee: Our criticisms apply only to what he makes of it."
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"We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it."
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"The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity."
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"Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space."
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"I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating."
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"The idea is to bring art to people who might never really interact with it. It's for all citizens, and it's about making the city more interesting and more visually significant."
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"It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention."
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"We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe."
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"Art is basically made by dissatisfied people who are willing to find some means to relieve the dissatisfaction."
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"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."
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"The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?"
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"The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it's about and why you're doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising and it's magic and wonderful and strange."
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"There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?"
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"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."
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"The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains."
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"Create with the heart, build with the mind."
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"The famed author Robert Lewis Stevenson declared that he'd trained his Brownies to be writers. As he slept, they would whisper fantastic plots in his ear -- for example, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode in "Olalla" when a young man from an old Spanish family bites his sister's hand."
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"Names sound nice because no one peeks behind the cover to see the sad face of a poem crying for meaning, while the name of the creator proudly smiles from the title."
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"When a great poet has lived certain things have been done once for all and cannot be achieved again."
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"The art of government is the organisation of idolatry."
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"How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do""Except to teach me for the first time what they meant."
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"Richard Wagner a musician who wrote music which is better than it sounds."
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