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Art Quotes
"The most difficult thing about writing, is writing the first line."
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"The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize."
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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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"Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line."
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"We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets."
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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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"I see my life in terms of music."
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"What do I sing, and what does my tambourine sing?"
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"Writers aren't exactly people they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person."
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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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"I have made up my mind that I will never marry. I shall be wedded to my art."
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"The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged."
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"Art invariably grows out of a period when, in general, the artist admires his own nation and wants to win its approval."
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"Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people."
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"A person who can write a long letter with ease cannot write ill."
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"Quixote shines from Lorca and Picasso, From DalA and El Greco, From the gloomy 'View of Toledo.' He was born before Cervantes."
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"For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down."
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"We are entitled to violate history, provided that it results in handsome offspring."
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"I don't want to see landscapes, i.e. scenic paintings of them, because I don't want to see the original realities " as optical effects that is. I want to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the expression of what are sometimes called abstract imaginings. The 'simply natural' is interesting no longer."
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"The clean book bill will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American art back into the junk heap."
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"An actress must be a woman whose emotional perceptions are true, and to make them so, she must have a fine contempt for any art or thought that betrays them for something false."
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"Also, I do seem attracted to trash, as if the clue--the clue--lies there. I'm always ferreting out elliptical points, odd angles. What I write doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There is fun and religion and psychotic horror strewn about like a bunch of hats. Also, there is a social or sociological drift--rather than toward the hard sciences, the overall impression is childish but interesting."
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"You do violence with your words if you force them - art is given - the words received, moment by moment from unseen hands - call it a Muse ..."
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"Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings."
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"Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before."
Art,
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"Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that's only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we're all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism."
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"Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable, what it is or what it means can never be said."
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"An artist reveals his naked soul in his work - and so, gentle reader, do you when you respond to it."
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"Rock and roll was my favorite, but before long I grew to enjoy Shinamoto's brand of classical music. This was music from another world, which had its appeal, but more than that I loved it because she was a part of that world."
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"Music... will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you."
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"A book takes me a year to write. It's too hard work for a revenge. If you knew how little you had to revenge."
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"His (the writer's) standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention out of his experience should produce a truer account than anything factual can be."
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"Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed."
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"Art in the blood is liable to take the strongest forms."
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"The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking."
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"Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter."
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"Beauty arises out of human inspiration."
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"For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations."
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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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