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Art Quotes
"A poet is a verb that blossoms light in gardens of dawn, or sometimes midnight."
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"This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it's just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it's gone."
17
"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
17
"The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic."
17
"Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place."
17
"To become an artist you have to be curious."
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"Poems are soft kitten furs. smoothing out the rough edges of my world."
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"Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image."
Art,
17
"Writers like Jack Kerouac (who called himself an "urban Thoreau") set forth to redefine and rediscover ways to live in America without slogging through what Kerouac called the endless system of "work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume..."
17
"Journey through the Power of the Rainbow represents a condensed compendium of literary efforts from a life dedicated to transforming the themes of injustice, grief, and despair that we all encounter during some unavoidable point of our existence into a sustainable life-affirming poetics of passionate creativity, empowered spiritual vision, and inspired commitment."
17
"Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing " which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power."
17
"Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic."
17
"To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge."
17
"Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical description; no image undissolved into regulation Updikean metaphor; no overture without a dramatized scene to 'show' what's 'told'; no denouement prior to an epiphany whose approach can be charted by and Freitag on any Macintosh."
17
"Moral beauty existed as clearly as any other form of beauty and perhaps that was where we could find the God who was so vividly, and sometimes bizarrely, described in our noisy religious explanations. It was an intriguing thought, as it meant that a concert could be a spiritual experience, a secular painting a religious icon, a beguiling face a passing angel."
17
"There isn't much art to writing, you just feel; feel everything deeply and somehow transform your lessons into a magical piece of work that will help someone else's heartache."
17
"It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work in not only convenient but unavoidable."
17
"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."
17
"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."
17
"That is an artist as I love artists, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art - panem et Circen."
17
"Wilder touches all the bases... in some kind of shorthand way. Now that's art."
17
"A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes he has the biggest piece."
17
"Writing is my life,a God given gift; no one on this planet can separate me from it."
17
"My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy."
17
"The House of Commons is a great unwieldy body, which requires great Art and some Cordials to keep it loyal."
17
"These poems are cups that I pour my life into. Here, Drink!"
17
"Creativity is the fragrance of individual freedom."
17
"In an age when nations and individuals routinely exchange murder for murder, when the healing grace of authentic spirituality is usurped by the divisive politics of religious organizations, and when broken hearts bleed pain in darkness without the relief of compassion, the voice of an exceptional poet producing exceptional work is not something the world can afford to dismiss."
17
"Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father,Your mother, your sister, or your brother?I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.Your friends?Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known.Your country?I do not know in what latitude it lies.Beauty?I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal.Gold?I hate it as you hate God.Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?I love the clouds the clouds that pass up thereUp there the wonderful clouds!"
17
"People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that's always thinking. A good book or song kidnaps your interior voice and does all the driving. With the artist in charge you're free for a little while to leave your body and be someone else."
17
"The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both."
17
"Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades."
17
"Imitation is criticism."
17
"He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down."
17
"I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure."
17
"Leave me some musicthat's chocolate for the heart."
17
"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."
17
"She placed her hand on her chest and thought, 'So this is what the poets write about'."
17
"A picture may describe a 1000 words but it will often need 1000 words to describe a picture."
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