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Art Quotes


"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."


"Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound."


"Then I speak to her in a language she has never heard, I speak to her in Spanish, in the tongue of the long, crepuscular verses of DAaz Casanueva; in that language in which JoaquAn Edwards preaches nationalism. My discourse is profound; I speak with eloquence and seduction; my words, more than from me, issue from the warm nights, from the many solitary nights on the Red Sea, and when the tiny dancer puts her arm around my neck, I understand that she understands. Magnificent language!"



"Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane."


"Some people's taste is to an educated taste as is the visual impression received by a purblind eye to that of a normal eye. Where a normal eye will see something clearly articulated, a weak eye will see a blurred patch of colour."


"I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues."


"Quixote shines from Lorca and Picasso, From DalA and El Greco, From the gloomy 'View of Toledo.' He was born before Cervantes."


"Some stories are true that never happened."



"On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away."


"The art of an artist must be his own art. It is... always a continuous chain of little inventions, little technical discoveries of one's own, in one's relation to the tool, the material and the colors."


"A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images."


"A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave."


"Art is exalted above religion and race. Not a single solitary soul these days believes in the religions of the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Greeks... Only their art, whenever it was beautiful, stands proud and exalted, rising above all time."


"Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort."


"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,


"Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong, we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde."


"No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything."



"Her secret? It is every artist's secret-passion. That is all. It is an open secret, and perfectly safe. Like heroism, it is inimitable in cheap materials."


"Conception, my boy, fundamental brain work, is what makes all the difference in art."


"I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it."


"A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent."


"Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears..."


"Music communicates with the soul."


"Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'."



"For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction."


"Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells. ... The success of later Shakespeare is the success of spells, where every element, however uneven, however incredible, is fastened to the next with perfect authority. The enchanted world shimmers but does not waver. A Midsummer Night's Dream is the first of his plays to accomplish this, The Tempest is enchantment's apotheosis."


"Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted."


"There are some catastrophes that a poor writer's pen cannot describe and which he is obliged to leave to the imagination of his readers with a bald statement of the facts."


"Writers understand the world better, but they lack the strength to change it. Perhaps that is so because they understand their limitations more than others."


"A beautiful woman is like a painting and remains beautiful no matter how old she is."


"Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance."
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