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Art Quotes
"Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow."
20
"The tune was sad, as the best of Ireland was, melancholy and lovely as a lover's tears."
20
"Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life."
20
"Writers haven't got any rockets to blast off. We don't even trundle the most insignificant auxiliary vehicle. We haven't got any military might. So what can literature do in the face of the merciless onslaught of open violence? One word of truth outweighs the whole world."
20
"Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic."
20
"I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed."
20
"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."
20
"Good fiction's job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable."
20
"Symbolism did not fall out of heaven or rise out of subterranean depths: it was elaborated like language, by the human reality."
20
"Art is a house that tries to be haunted."
20
"It is impossible to be truly artistic without the risk of offending someone somewhere."
20
"In the years when I discovered the Abbé Vallet volume, there was a widespread conviction that one should write only out of a commitment to the present, in order to change the world. Now, after ten years or more, the man of letters (restored to his loftiest dignity) can happily write out of pure love of writing."
20
"To say that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic merit, is no better than to say he is rheumatic or diabetic."
20
"Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label -- to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must never not write a certain kind of novel out of fear of what the reaction to it will be."
20
"Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.Vice and virtue are the artist's materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feelings, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectators, and not life, that art really mirrors."
20
"I see my life in terms of music."
20
"High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water."
20
"It's so easy to lose faith and become lost in all of the politics of the world. That's why we need the arts. To sublimate our frustration and anger into something beautiful. Freud called sublimation a virtuous defence mechanism because it is in the arts that we can find our humanity."
20
"Radio was theater of the mind."
20
"Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other."
20
"The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty."
20
"All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up."
20
"I have made up my mind that I will never marry. I shall be wedded to my art."
20
"To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming - like worms when a rock is lifted - under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky."
20
"No man ever puts down what he intended to say... words... are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible."
20
"A writer, like most artists, needs a partner who can act as the fuel to his artistic mind and soul, yet has the great ability to sober him up and help him be in sync with the non-artistic part of his soul."
20
"Split the Lark-and you'll find the Music, Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled."
20
"So witless did these ideas strike me as being, so sweeping and pompous the way they were expressed, that I associated them immediately with literature."
20
"The art teacher's scarlet book was called Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. 'As the title suggests,' Mr Dunwoody saw the book'd caught my attention, 'it's about the history of opticians. What are you about?"
20
"Movies can be instruments of enlightenment."
20
"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."
20
"The educator and the public need to have an opportunity to discuss why certain art is important."
20
"I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play."
20
"I am no more annoyed when I think of the expression, than I should be annoyed by a man's opinion of a picture of mine, who had no eye for pictures; or of a piece of music of mine, who had no ear for music."
20
"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."
20
"Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away."
20
"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."
20
"The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His works means nothing, otherwise. It has no meaning."
20
"A single radio post still heard him. The only link between him and the world was a wave of music, a minor modulation. Not a lament, no cry, yet purest of sounds that ever spoke despair."
20
"There are no bad pictures, that's just how your face looks sometimes."
20
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