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Art Quotes
"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."
16
"But most of the time, with a contented resignation that comes normally to a man only at the end of a long and busy life, he sat before the keyboard and filled the air with his beloved Bach. Perhaps he was deceiving himself, perhaps this was some merciful trick of the mind but now it seemed to Jan that this what he had always wished to do. His secret ambition had at last dared to emerge into the full light of consciousness. Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world."
16
"The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature."
16
"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."
16
"We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art."
16
"When a great poet has lived certain things have been done once for all and cannot be achieved again."
16
"Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue."
16
"Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound."
16
"The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode."
16
"Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane."
16
"Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space."
16
"To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art."
16
"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."
16
"All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up."
16
"When you read a comic book, there's a space between what's happening on the panel and what you have to literally see in your mind. That's not true of movies, where you see everything."
16
"Make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came."
16
"Me, following her home.Her, thinking she's alone.For hours, I watched her paint, sat in the darkness, and marveled."
16
"So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read in school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place."
16
"Split the Lark-and you'll find the Music, Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled."
16
"The educator and the public need to have an opportunity to discuss why certain art is important."
16
"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."
16
"A man who writes a story is forced to put into it the best of his knowledge and the best of his feeling. The discipline of the written word punishes stupidity and dishonesty. A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you."
16
"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."
16
"Art allows people a way to dream their way out of their struggle."
16
"With poetry, rules are meant to be broken. And that's the beauty of poetry; it's rebellious, like me."
16
"Oh honey, have you learned nothing from these plays? Ain't such a line between faking and being."
16
"I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd."
16
"Who is there that in logical words can express the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech which leads us to the edge of the Infinite and lets us for moments gaze into that!"
16
"Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.""I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray."
16
"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art."
16
"A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave."
16
"We were given clear concrete tools. The course did a great job demystifying the art of fiction writing and fostering confidence. The instructor brought complex concepts down to earth. I will miss coming here every week."
16
"The professors in the academy say, "Do not make the model more beautiful than she is, and my soul whispers, "O if you could only paint the model as beautiful as she really is."
16
"Art doesn't give rise to anything in us that isn't already there. It simply stirs our curious consciousness and sparks a fire that illuminates who we have always wanted to be."
16
"I believe art has to take responsibility but it should not give up being art."
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"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."
16
"A poem often begins in the midst of wonderful wandering thoughts that are eager to open wings to fly in the beautiful blue sky of imagination."
16
"Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation."
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