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Art Quotes
"Stasis in darkness.Then the substanceless blue."
18
"There is only one secret to great writing and that's great writing."
18
"Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty."
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"Camerado this is no book. Who touches this touches a man."
18
"The crushed teapot in the rubbish of the bulldozed house will sing in your ears forever."
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"Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less."
18
"Art changes posture and posture changes innocent bystanders."
18
"Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision beginning with one corner of the canvas painting what he thinks should be there not quite pulling it off covering it over with white paint and trying again each time finding out what his painting isn't until he finally finds out what it is. And when you finally do find out what one corner of your vision is you're off and running."
18
"Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it."
18
"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."
18
"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."
18
"There are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you."
18
"I left the bankbecause they wouldn't deposit my cheque of poems.So I went to the store,but they didn't acceptmy currency of words.So I boxed all my storiesand took them to charity.But they refused my donation and asked me to give blood instead.I opened the notebooks and made them look, 'What do you think I wrote these in?"
18
"She has wings the color of wild and a soul the color of art."
18
"Every sword that was dripping the blood became a pen. Every word that was written in it became a poetry."
18
"Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative."
18
"..."vers libre," (free verse) or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture."
18
"Love is always based on self-interest."
18
"She, however, attentively watched my looks, and her artist's pride was gratified, no doubt, to read my heartfelt admiration in my eyes."
18
"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."
18
"The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize."
18
"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."
18
"What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves - the music of our being - which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is string and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history."
18
"Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness."
18
"If the writer doesn't sweat, the reader will."
18
"The music of revelation announces itself to the reader in somber brooding tones or in melodies light as air and one is invited to dance with the most captivating of partners: poetry."
18
"He wanted to be a poet,' someone else put in while Maggie hugged Tim and patted his back. 'Said he'd only lacked the words to be one."
18
"Eloquence is painted thought, and thus those who, after having painted it, add somewhat more, make a picture, not a portrait."
18
"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!"
18
"Art, in the first place, has to connect with yourself."
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"Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply."
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"Black and white is refuge of colors from their own nullity."
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"Many years before, Ka had explained to me that when a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to feel to the margins; it was, he said, this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art."
18
"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."
18
"It's interesting, isn't it? . . . the chandelier . . . it reminds me of mushroom soup."
18
"Free the fire fluttering inside her rib cage. Work her muscles, the bow, the violin, until she played herself to ash and embers and left the rest of the world behind to smolder."
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"To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged, to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing-including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune."
18
"A person who can write a long letter with ease cannot write ill."
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"For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down."
18
"There have been times I've felt so much art in my soul I grew sick of artists."
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