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Art Quotes
"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."
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"I entered the literary world, really, from outside. My entire background has been in sciences; I was a biology major in college, then went to medical school. I've never had any formal training in writing."
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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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"I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable."
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"Art never comes from happiness."
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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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"Writing is draining. Every word is like lifting a stone and levering it into place. Your head aches, your muscles ache and every word you conjure up is heavier than the last one."
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"There is only one secret to great writing and that's great writing."
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"He drifted about with his head full of myths, always at least half lost in some otherland of story. Demons and wingsmiths, seraphim and spirits, he love it all."
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"Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty."
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"Be a poet in action as well as in words."
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"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."
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"Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming about him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists give everything to their art, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in themselves. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures."
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"Like how stars might sound. Or moons But not mountains. Too floaty for mountains. It's a sound like one planet singing to another, high stretched and full of different voices starting at different notes and sloping down to other different notes but all weaving together in a rope of sound that's sad but not sad and slow but not slow and all singing one word. One word."
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"To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world."
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"The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers."
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"An educated person's ideas of Art are drwan naturally from what Art has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends."
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"You know, the way I feel, if I read a science fiction book by a new writer which is a lot better than what I do, instead of going on a bummer right away and saying, "Oh Christ, I'm obsolete, I'm outdated, I've lost it. I have this tremendous sense of joy. I don't have to write all the great goddamn science fiction in the world. Somebody else is going to carry this torch. It's such a relief to sit with my feet up on the wall and to know that if I never wrote another book science fiction is going ahead."
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"He would argue with her about killing themselves; and explain how wicked people were; how he could see them making up lies as they passed in the street. He knew all their thoughts, he said; he knew everything. He knew the meaning of the world, he said."
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"A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes he has the biggest piece."
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"The human art form is in uniting fruitful activity with a contemplative stance, not one or the other, but always both at the same time."
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"A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness."
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"The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal."
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"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."
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"Man lives in the midst of images. Literature offers him a critical image of himself."
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"You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance."
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"Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear."
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"It's sarcasm, Josh.'Sarcasm?'It's from the Greek, sarkasmos. To bite the lips. It means that you aren't really saying what you mean, but people will get your point. I invented it, Bartholomew named it.'Well, if the village idiot named it, I'm sure it's a good thing.'There you go, you got it.'Got what?'Sarcasm.'No, I meant it.'Sure you did.'Is that sarcasm?'Irony, I think.'What's the difference?'I haven't the slightest idea.'So you're being ironic now, right?'No, I really don't know.'Maybe you should ask the idiot.'Now you've got it.'What?'Sarcasm."
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"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."
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"These poems are cups that I pour my life into. Here, Drink!"
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"People see a Macbeth film. They imagine they have seen Macbeth, and don't want to see it again; so when your Mr. Hackett or somebody comes round to act the play, he finds the house empty. That is what has happened to dozens of good plays whose authors have allowed them to be filmed. It shall not happen to mine if I can help it."
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"Please Mia," he implores. "Don't make me write a song."
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"Writing is a mysterious activity."
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"Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades."
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"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."
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"For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer. And among artists, the writer, the man of words, is the person to whom we look to be able best to express his suffering."
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"Eloquence is painted thought, and thus those who, after having painted it, add somewhat more, make a picture, not a portrait."
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"Today everything exists to end in a photograph."
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"If all of the steps of surrender are present, then a great Rembrandt or Monet will evoke love because the artist is simply there in all his naked humanity."
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