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Art Quotes
"Miles Davis would have this lineup of all these amazing musicians and one day would just say, 'We're done.' After tons of great records and tickets sold, he said, 'Now I'm going to grow my hair out and play my horn through a wah-wah pedal.' Rather than play it safe, he went on."
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"Undeniable obsession of words that quickens my spirit."
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"You do violence with your words if you force them - art is given - the words received, moment by moment from unseen hands - call it a Muse ..."
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"Only the writers can change or fix the past by going back to edit old works."
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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 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."
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"Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before."
Art,
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"I discovered that night (in his college's student politics) that an audience has a feel to it, and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together."
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"The great works are produced in such an ecstasy of love that they must always be unworthy of it, however great their worth otherwise."
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"An artist reveals his naked soul in his work - and so, gentle reader, do you when you respond to it."
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"Rock and roll was my favorite, but before long I grew to enjoy Shinamoto's brand of classical music. This was music from another world, which had its appeal, but more than that I loved it because she was a part of that world."
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"Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything."
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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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"Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet."
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"Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them."
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"Every man is a poet at heart."
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"Music is the most abstract of the arts; dance, the most concrete."
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"When she spoke, Tom held his breath, so eagerly he listened; when she sang, he sat like one entranced. She touched his organ, and from that bright epoch even it, the old companion of his happiest hours, incapable as he had thought of elevation, began a new and deified existence."
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"Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter."
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"Look, do you see that poem?' she said suddenly, pointing."
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"You will not find it in the words of poets or the longing eyes of sailors. If you want to know of love, look to a trouper's hands as he makes his music. A trouper knows."
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"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination."
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"I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across-not to just depict life-or criticize it-but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way."
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"Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem."
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"To understand fully the importance of music, you must try to imagine a world without music! Such a world would be a world of hopelessness and boredom!"
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"The artist lives to have stories to tell and to learn to tell them well."
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"So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words."
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"To become a work of art is the object of living."
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"Part came from Lane, and part from D.H. Lawrence;Gide, though I didn't know it then, gave part.They taught me to express my deep abhorrenceIf I caught anyone preferring ArtTo Life and Love and being Pure-in-heart.I lived with crooks but seldom was molested;The Pure-in-heart can never be arrested."
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"Music isn't just a pleasure, a transient satisfaction. It's a need, a deep hunger; and when the music is right, it's joy. Love. A foretaste of heaven. A comfort in grief. Is it too much to think that perhaps God speaks to us sometimes through music? How, then, could I be so ungrateful as to refuse the message?"
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"The glow dies down, and she's standing at the end of my bed--the one who's been following me around leaving feather messages. I take in the torn fishnets, plaid mini-kilt, shiny, riveted breastplate with leather straps at the sides and a worn Great Temolo decal near the left shoulder. Her wings are a crazy black-and-white-checkered pattern, like they've been spray-painted at a body shop to look like hipster sneakers."
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"One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought."
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"I'm quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music."
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"Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation."
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"A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes."
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"I don't get many hecklers now but answering them is an art form in itself."
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"Calligraphy is a geometry of the soul which manifests itself physically."
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