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Art Quotes
"The particulars of life do not matter to the artist, they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius."
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"Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.''You really must not say things like that before Dorian, Harry.''Before which Dorian? The one who is pouring out tea for us, or the one in the picture?''Before either.''I should like to come to the theatre with you, Lord Henry,' said the lad.'Then you shall come; and you will come, too, Basil, won't you?''I can't, really. I would sooner not. I have a lot of work to do.''Well, then you and I will go alone, Mr. Gray.''I should like that awfully.'The painter bit his lip and walked over, cup in hand, to the picture. 'I shall stay with the real Dorian,' he said, sadly."
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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."
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"When an artist paints a flower, she borrows the beauty from nature and adds fragrance from her own heart."
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"Talking is like playing on the harp there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music."
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"Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think."
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"After all this time I found that the novel is in fact punk rock."
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"Listen.Do you see that you can't hear snowfall?Look.Do you sensethat you can't see love?Touch.Do you graspthat you can't catch poems?Try.Smell this glass. Go on taste this cloud.These material senses won't get you far untilyou feelthe velvet glove caress your soul."
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"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."
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"I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book."
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"The cruise was the conduit for what would become my third book. While I was traveling and writing for ctnow.com, women across the United States and from the Caribbean emailed not to ask about my geographic journey but my existential one. "How do you find the courage to travel on your own? they wondered. "How do you keep from getting lonely? Don't you feel self-conscious eating out alone? After the first 30 emails like these I thought, There's a book here. It would be eight years before I published Postcards and Pearls: Life Lessons from Solo Moments on the Road. But the inspiration for publication came during the cruise."
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"The story was gradually taking shape. Pilon liked it this way. It ruined a story to have it all come out quickly. The good story lay in half-told things which must be filled in out of the hearer's own experience."
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"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."
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"If you're an actor, and you've thought your way into the part, then you're character portrayal will have authority..."
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"Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me."
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"Undeniable obsession of words that quickens my spirit."
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"The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance."
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"The price an artist pays for doing what he wants is that he has to do it."
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"The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas."
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"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."
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"Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit."
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"In paintings, music, poetry, architecture, we feel the elusive energy that moves through us and the air and the ground all the time, that usually disperses and turns chaotic in our busy-ness and distractedness and moodiness. Artists channel it, corral it, make it visible to the rest of us. The best works of art are like semaphores of our experience, signaling what we didn't know was true but do now."
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"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."
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"That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity-that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are an essential part and characteristic of beauty."
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"You have to keep doing it, Even if no one is watching. The best artists, are those Who live from their expressions, Not chasing the impressions."
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"Religion should teach about hope to come for all, not terror for some."
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"Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them."
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"The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art."
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"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."
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"I have often misunderstood men grossly, and I have misrepresented them when I understood them, sacrificing sense to make a phrase. Here, of course, is where even the most conscientious critic often goes aground; he is apt to be an artist before he is a scientist, and the impulse to create something passionately is stronger in him than the impulse to state something accurately."
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"The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction."
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"Like many people who dress in black, the lump of coal was interested in becoming an artist."
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"Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being."
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"Experience is an author's most valuable asset, experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes."
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"Color is the overpowering of black, white " the final victory over black."
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