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Art Quotes
"If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman."
60
"No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we'd rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn't know how to deal with women."
60
"Human requirements are the inspiration for art."
60
"Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence."
60
"There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time."
59
"Well, we have certainly produced great art before we did this. In my view, there are any number of areas of government which tax money should not be spent."
59
"I love the art of acting, and I love film, because you always have anther chance if you want it. You know, if we - if this isn't going well, you can't say - well, you could say - let's stop. Let's start over again, Gene, because you were too nervous."
59
"In the end, my reasons for moving down the timeline and introducing a new cast have more to do with keeping myself entertained, on the assumption that if I get bored, my readers are going to be even more bored."
59
"I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter."
59
"I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information."
59
"As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too."
59
"My argument would be that I don't think there is much that's genuinely political art that is good art."
58
"A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds."
58
"A part of sexuality may go to research, and a much larger part must lead to aesthetic creation. The art of the future will, because of the very opportunities and materials it will have at its command, need an infinitely stronger formative impulse than it does now."
58
"When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art."
58
"To injure an opponent is to injure yourself. To control aggression without inflicting injury in the Art of Peace."
58
"I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect."
58
"I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it."
58
"Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability."
58
"The most momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil."
58
"The task of art today is to bring chaos into order."
58
"It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something."
58
"The word poet literally means maker: anything which is not well made doesn't exist."
58
"Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship."
58
"When you dance, your whole body dances, your skin and bones, your soul, The tips of your fingers and the roots of your hair. When you stop dancing you stop living."
58
"I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe."
58
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