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Art Quotes
"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..."
19
"With poetry, rules are meant to be broken. And that's the beauty of poetry; it's rebellious, like me."
19
"A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved."
19
"Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry."
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"A poet is a blind optimist.The world is against him formany reasons. But thepoet persists. He believesthat he is on the right track,no matter what any of his fellow men say. In hiseternal search for truth, thepoet is alone.He tries to be timeless in a society built on time."
19
"Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up. It engraves on the countenance of its servant the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventures, and even if he has outwardly existed in cloistral tranquility, it leads in the long term to overfastidiousness, over-refinement, nervous fatigue and overstimulation, such as can seldom result from a life of the most extravagant passions and pleasures."
19
"Something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul."
19
"We were given clear concrete tools. The course did a great job demystifying the art of fiction writing and fostering confidence. The instructor brought complex concepts down to earth. I will miss coming here every week."
19
"To paint is to love again, live again, see again. To get up at the crack of dawn in order to take a peek at the water colors one did the day before, or even a few hours before, is like stealing a look at the beloved while she sleeps. The thrill is even greater if one has first to draw back the curtains. How they glow in the cold light of early dawn! Is there any writer who rouses himself at daybreak in order to read the pages of his manuscript? Perish the thought!"
19
"Beauty arises out of human inspiration."
19
"I grasp words for the sake of clutching My mind considers them heart touchingRight then I write for my reader's pleasureNot knowing what distance a soul can measure."
19
"Then marble soften'd into life grew warm."
19
"Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it."
19
"I only wrote prose before I met you. My musings were superfluous and serious as well. But now the words dance with me. I sing with them and we create poetry."
19
"In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare's plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it."
19
"It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him."
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"In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real."
19
"And, certainly to him Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation."
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"This is almost always the case: A piece of art receives its f(r)ame when found offensive."
19
"An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog."
18
"My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker."
18
"One of the nice things about books as opposed to television and movies to some extent is it's not a passive entertainment. People really do get involved, and they do create, and they do have their own visions of what different characters look like and what should happen. It's great - it means their brains are working."
18
"A good painter is to paint two main things namely men and the working of man's mind."
18
"Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen."
18
"Queen of arts and daughter of heaven."
18
"Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry."
18
"There is a certain standard of grace and beauty which consists in a certain relation between our nature... and the thing which pleases us."
18
"Photographs are just light and time" - Aza Holmes."
18
"Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on."
18
"The art of reading between the lines is as old as manipulated information."
18
"What is a Poet? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them."
18
"To receive the compliments of being a good writer really annoys me, as this has been my perception that a writer as such has no value, it is the readers who invest their thought process, give life to dead words, coupled with their own imagination, thus syncing the content to their tastes and sensibilities, that matter."
18
"Art never comes from happiness."
18
"Art is what we call...the thing an artist does.It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human.Art is not in the ...eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist."
18
"Stasis in darkness.Then the substanceless blue."
18
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