top of page
.png){kind=small}
Art Quotes
"People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater."
15
"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."
15
"In truly good writing no matter how many times you read it you do not know how it is done. That is beacause there is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dis-sect out. It continues and it is always valid. Each time you re-read you see or learn something new."
15
"The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it."
15
"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."
15
"And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it."
15
"Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth."
15
"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."
15
"The proper stuff of fiction does not exist everything is the proper stuff of fiction every feeling every thought every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon no perception comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her as well as honour and love her for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured."
15
"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."
15
"I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists' relationship is essentially with their work - not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience."
15
"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."
15
"To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into light."
15
"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."
15
"As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop."
15
"Good fiction's job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable."
15
"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."
15
"They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two."
15
"The House of Commons is a great unwieldy body, which requires great Art and some Cordials to keep it loyal."
15
"Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty."
15
"We must grant the artist his subject his idea his donnee: Our criticisms apply only to what he makes of it."
15
"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."
15
"The artist like the God of the creation remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork invisible refined out of existence indifferent paring his fingernails."
15
"Give me a museum and I'll fill it."
15
"Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good."
15
"A critic must be knowledgeable in several fields, practices, and mediums. Brushing off art that they personally don't understand, is not a critique."
15
"Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty."
15
"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."
15
"There are no bad pictures, that's just how your face looks sometimes."
15
"True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist."
15
"Ben invented mathematical theories that even he didn't manage to remember and wrote such bizarre tales of adventure that he ended up destroying them a week after they were finished, embarrassed at the thought that he had penned them."
15
"Often something looks, or is felt to look, "better" in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering.)"
15
"Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem."
15
"It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection."
15
bottom of page