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Art Quotes
"They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two."
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"Let it not be said that I have said nothing new. The arrangement of the material is new."
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"The most difficult thing about writing, is writing the first line."
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"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."
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"How to play music may be known. At the commencement of the piece, all the parts should sound together. As it proceeds, they should be in harmony while severally distinct and flowing without break, and thus on to the conclusion."
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"We should comport ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages - stand quietly before them and wait till they speak to us."
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"In the hall itself the din of the music - for this is the real way to play a jukebox and what it was originally for - was so tremendous that it shattered Dean and Stan and me for a moment in the realization that we had never dared to play music as we wanted, and this was how loud we wanted."
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"Poetry looking in the mirror sees art, and art looking in a mirror sings poetry."
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"At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls."
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"Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings."
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"We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell."
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"Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty."
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"Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art."
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"How convenient it is to declare that everything is totally ugly within the habit of the époque, rather than applying oneself to extract from it the dark and cryptic beauty, however faint and invisible it is."
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"Oh honey, have you learned nothing from these plays? Ain't such a line between faking and being."
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"Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed."
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"Soprano basso even the contralto Wished him five fathom under the Rialto."
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"Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being."
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"What did one see if one looked in any depth into the world of this writer's fiction? Elegant self-control concealing from the world's eyes until the very last moment a state of inner disintegration and biological decay; sallow ugliness, sensuously marred and worsted, which nevertheless is able to fan its smouldering concupiscence to a pallid impotence, which from the glowing depths of the spirit draws strength to cast down a whole proud people at the foot of the Cross and set its own foot upon them as well; gracious poise and composure in the empty austere service of form; the false, dangerous life of the born deceiver, his ambition and his art which lead so soon to exhaustion."
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"Support for the arts -- merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!"
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"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."
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"There is no competition of sounds between a nightingale and a violin."
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"I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible the world has written its own."
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"I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil."
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"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."
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"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."
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"I believe art has to take responsibility but it should not give up being art."
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"Work your craft, until it becomes an art from."
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"I regained my soul through literature after those times I'd lost it to wild-eyed gypsy girls on the European streets."
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"He was a writer and words were his weapons."
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"And in fact the artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss. And if instead of "heat" one could say "sex";- sex in the great, pure sense of the word, free of any sin attached to it by the Church, - then his art would be very great and infinitely important. His poetic power is great and as strong as a primal instinct; it has its own relentless rhythms in itself and explodes from him like a volcano."
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"The birth of a true poet is neither an insignificant event nor an easy delivery. Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to volunteer the intricate machinery of its blood and prayers and muscles for a gestation period much longer than nine months or even nine years."
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"Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come."
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"I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination."
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"Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting."
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"A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair, and some great stories have neither."
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"To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am willing to excuse a thousand faults."
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"Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it."
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"The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."
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