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Art Quotes
"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."
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"It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious."
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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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"I think they would like the songs betterif I left out the names, or changedthe pronouns."
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"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."
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"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."
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"I have often misunderstood men grossly, and I have misrepresented them when I understood them, sacrificing sense to make a phrase. Here, of course, is where even the most conscientious critic often goes aground; he is apt to be an artist before he is a scientist, and the impulse to create something passionately is stronger in him than the impulse to state something accurately."
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"A girl's got to use what she's given and I'm not going to make a guy drool the way a Britney video does. So I take it to extremes. I don't say I dress sexily on stage - what I do is so extreme. It's meant to make guys think: 'I don't know if this is sexy or just weird."
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"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."
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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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"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art."
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"True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist."
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"Like many people who dress in black, the lump of coal was interested in becoming an artist."
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"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.)"
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"Music is crucial. Beyond no way can I overstress this fact. Let's say you're southbound on the interstate, cruising alone in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on top of your little sheetmetal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you're sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you--do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega, clearance, closeout, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale?"
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"A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits."
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"Color is the overpowering of black, white " the final victory over black."
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"I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility."
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"As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."
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"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."
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"The secret of living in peace with all people lies in the art of understanding each one by his own individuality."
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"Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline."
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"Every story needs to be worth telling."
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"I made myself famous by writing 'songs' and lyrics about the beauty of the things I did and ugliness, too."
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"Girls, there are poets who learn from youto say, what you, in your aloneness, are;and they learn through you to live distantness,as the evenings through the great starsbecome accustomed to eternity."
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"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."
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"There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true."
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"The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune,that makes us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide,lost in a forest remote from all human habitation."
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"Whereas there's a wealth of galleries in Australia, everyone's got a gallery in Australia or wants your work. Because the art scene is smaller in Indonesia, there's not so much competition."
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"The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it."
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"To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand-that is art."
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"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."
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"He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: general Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars."
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"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."
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"It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt..."
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