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Art Quotes
"There are 2 kinds of artists, essentially: those who want to make something popular, and those who want to make something dignified. But then there is still that rare hybrid case, and perhaps by that unintentional stroke of genius, in which one's work uncontrollably becomes both popular and dignified yet beyond its time."
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"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."
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"Imitation is criticism."
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"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."
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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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"Poetry looking in the mirror sees art, and art looking in a mirror sings poetry."
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"A true work of art is shaped by the hands of another, and if in shaping us that 'other' is anything other than God, the piece will never touch the remotest periphery of its potential."
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"Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other."
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"A picture may describe a 1000 words but it will often need 1000 words to describe a picture."
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"We grooved together with a rhythm so beautiful that I could feel the moment turned into poetry."
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"Artist is not human, but humanity."
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"I'd always had an ear for beauty, and maybe I'd had an eye for it as well, but until that day, I'd not recognized that the truth in great music could be found also in great art, that the heart could be lifted and the mind sharpened equally by both."
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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."
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"Then I played the song that hides in the center of me. That wordless music that moves through the secret places in my heart. I played it carefully, strumming it slow and low into the dark stillness of the night. I would like to say it is a happy song, that it is sweet and bright, but it is not."
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"Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art."
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"You can't enjoy art or books in a hurry."
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"Clive was losing sensation in his feet, and as he stamped them the rhythm gave him back the ten note falling figure, ritardando, a cor anglais, and rising softly against it, contrapuntally, cellos in mirror image. Her face in it. The end."
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"No. No, it was a lonely writer I met one stormy day in Laguna Beach. He had a poem about Thelonious Monk that he sealed in a tin can and labeled Campbell's Cream of Piano Soup. Later I hear he killed himself to avoid the draft."
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"Dance your Soulful path / and you shall know the magic / of your mind & heart / and all the beauty laughing / to fill your rising self."
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"I'm working on another Lyra book right now " it's called The Book of Dust.'It's going very well and it will be finished when I write the words 'The End'."
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"I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me, before.'A dream of form in days of thought'."
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"At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls."
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"And this is what being an artist means, being a poet? To sacrifice yourself for your art, sacrifice your heart for your art, because it's only through something broken that something beautiful can grow."
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"The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art."
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"She moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx."
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"I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect."
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"All the world is competent to judge my pictures except those who are of my profession."
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"That's how it is with art. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning are incapable of such writing."
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"For essential beauty is infinite, and, as the soul of Nature needs an endless succession of varied forms to embody her loveliness, countless faces of beauty springing forth, not any two the same, at every one of her heart-throbs, so the individual form needs an infinite change of its environments, to enable it to uncover all the phases of its loveliness."
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"A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not."
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"If I were only allowed to read or enjoy art or listen to music made by people whose opinions and beliefs were the same as mine, I think the world would be a pretty dismal sort of a place... Most, probably all, human beings get to do awful things and believe things that other human beings think they should be burned for believing, and they get to do and believe wonderful things too, and artists, writers, musicians, creators, actors, are nothing if not human beings."
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"Art is the product of an imperfect world. In a perfect world, art would not exist."
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"The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities.... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true."
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"I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story."
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