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Art Quotes
"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."
13
"Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right - as right as you can, anyway - it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you're very lucky...more will want to do the former than the latter."
13
"Names sound nice because no one peeks behind the cover to see the sad face of a poem crying for meaning, while the name of the creator proudly smiles from the title."
13
"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."
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"The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both."
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"If the writer doesn't sweat, the reader will."
13
"A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second."
13
"The world by day is like European music; a flowing concourse of vast harmony, composed of concord and discord and many disconnected fragments. And the night world is our Indian music; one pure, deep and tender raga."
13
"Any form of art can be known only in deep silence, to be in silence is to be receptive - No sooner you become receptive, you become woman, it has nothing to do with gender, its a quality, which is why woman is epitome of Receptivity!"
13
"Art, in the first place, has to connect with yourself."
13
"I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure."
13
"When you listen to radio you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine. Exactly, my dear sir, as the radio for ten minutes together projects the most lovely music ithout regard into the most impossible places, into respectable drawing rooms and attics and into the midst of chattering, guzzling, yawning and sleeping listeners, and exactly as it strips this music of its sensuous beauty, spoils and scratches and beslims it and yet cannot altogether destroy its spirit, just so does life, the so-called reality, deal with the sublime picture-play of the world and make a hurley-burley of it."
13
"Concert' doesn't mean standing up like a target in front of thousands of strangers. It means coming together. It means harmony."
13
"Violinists wear the imprint on their necks with prideFor they are the players of harmony.Pilgrims, too, wear the imprint on their foreheads with prideFor they are the conductors of unity.And Lovers? Why, they are made humble by the imprint on their heartsFor they are merely the instruments of rhapsody."
13
"She placed her hand on her chest and thought, 'So this is what the poets write about'."
13
"Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice."
13
"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."
13
"The first source of art, then, is akin to the display of colors and plumage on the male animal in mating time; it lies in the desire to adorn and beautify the body. And just as self-love and mate-love, overflowing, pour out their surplus of affection upon nature, so the impulse to beautify passes from the personal to the external world. The soul seeks to express its feeling in objective ways, through color and form; art really begins when men undertake tobeautify things."
13
"... a book indeed sometimes debauched me from my work."
13
"To grow a melody?" "You can't grow a melody on purpose, she said, and slyly added, "you have to plant an accidental."
13
"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."
13
"Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end."
13
"There have been times I've felt so much art in my soul I grew sick of artists."
13
"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?"
13
"The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living."
13
"Nature has made all her truths independent of one another. Our art makes one dependent on the other."
13
"Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us."
13
"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."
13
"The name does not deserve the poem, but the poem deserves the name."
13
"And thus when by Poetry, or when by Music, the most entrancing of the poetic moods, we find ourselves melted into tears, we weep then, not... through excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and raptorous joys of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses."
13
"Eloquence, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white."
13
"We hit the sunny beaches where we occupy ourselves keeping the sun off our skin, the saltwater off our bodies, and the sand out of our belongings."
13
"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."
13
"Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet."
13
"I am a confused Musician who got sidetracked into this goddamn Word business for so long that I never got back to music - except maybe when I find myself oddly alone in a quiet room with only a typewriter to strum on and a yen to write a song. Who knows why? Maybe I just feel like singing - so I type.These quick electric keys are my Instrument, my harp, my RCA glass-tube microphone, and my fine soprano saxophone all at once. That is my music, for good or ill, and on some nights it will make me feel like a god. Veni, Vidi, Vici... That is when the fun starts..."
13
"To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.1010 One has only to spend a term trying to teach college literature to realize that the quickest way to kill an author's vitality for potential readers is to present that author ahead of his time as "great" or "classic." Because then the author becomes for the students like medicine or vegetables, something the authorities have declared "good for them" that they "ought to like," at which point the students' nictitating membranes come down, and everyone just goes through the requisite motions of criticism and paper-writing without feeling one real or relevant thing. It's like removing all oxygen from the room before trying to start a fire."
13
"Music is the most abstract of the arts; dance, the most concrete."
13
"Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry."
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