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Art Quotes
"If artists and poets are unhappy it is after all because happiness does not interest them."
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"Art is the expression of appreciation of beauty real or imagined. It's also an examination of what it means to be alive with all its varied things, emotions, and experiences. We are forever trying to explain ourselves to the world or the world to ourselves."
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"The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when all your arrows are spent."
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"All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike."
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"When the full-grown poet came,Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, with all its shows of day and night,) saying, He is mine;But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous and unreconciled, Nay, he is mine alone;- Then the full-grown poet stood between the two, and took each by the hand;And to-day and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly holding hands,Which he will never release until he reconciles the two,And wholly and joyously blends them."
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"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude."
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"Every man is a poet at heart."
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"Artists, by their free expressions, encourage others to be free. This is the quality that makes works of art enduring."
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"A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images."
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"Artistic temperament is like a king with vigor and unlimited opportunity. You shake the structure to pieces by playing with it."
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"A harsh crack followed the rumble of thunder, a lightning strike. With that, the other musicians began to play, bringing in the tinkling sounds of light rain, the deeper thrum of thicker droplets. The others played the crashing waves, the lapping of water against a nonexistent shore. All around us were the sounds of water, dripping from faucets, gushing from waterfalls."
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"If you're an artist, you've submitted to authority..."
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"A girl's got to use what she's given and I'm not going to make a guy drool the way a Britney video does. So I take it to extremes. I don't say I dress sexily on stage - what I do is so extreme. It's meant to make guys think: 'I don't know if this is sexy or just weird."
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"The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure, it's a little like making love, the physical act of love."
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"Poetry is what happens when nothing else can."
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"Poetry is nothing if it exists only in books. One has to find it in one's own life."
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"[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination."
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"The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature."
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"People believe that photographs are true and therefore cannot be art."
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"From Mozart I learnt to say important things in a conversational way."
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"A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits."
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"I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all."
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"It's not easy to write a poem about a poem."
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"I've marked our sacred place not with stones - I've put it my art to keep it safe..."
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"Support for the arts -- merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!"
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"An artist that makes art merely to meet a demand is a slave to what his patrons wants to see, or, hear."
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"A versifier arranges sounds, a poet arranges meaning in the sounds."
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"One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin."
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"Beauty is the manifestation of love."
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"To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography."
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"Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time."
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"Creating any type of art is an actual experience inasmuch as it affects the artist's life. The experience of writing not only merges disparate parts of the mind, this expressive experience affects the evolution of the self. Writing is not about the process of creating a piece of literature; rather, writing is an artistic, transformative experience. All opposite forces in human nature are reconciled in the unity of consciousness, which is why the most fully developed human being strives to makes their unconsciousness thoughts, feelings, and prejudices conscious through acts of contemplation."
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"There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?"
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"Poetry is an art that uses words to paint vivid pictures of perceptions and emotions."
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"We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance."
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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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"In any first-class work of art, you can find passages that in themselves are extremely boring, but try to cut them out, as they are in an abridged edition, and you lose the life of the work. Don't think that art that is alive can remain on the same level of interest throughout - and the same is true of life."
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"What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy."
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