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Art Quotes
!["...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my arguments by writing well."](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAICRAEAOw==)
"...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my arguments by writing well."
17
"She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells."
17
"Writing poetry is a state of free float."
17
"The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing."
17
"In art, theories are as useful as a doctor's prescription; one must be sick to believe them."
17
"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."
17
"The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass."
17
"She lives in the poetry she cannot write."
17
"By the will art thou lost, by the will art thou found, by the will art thou free, captive, and bound."
17
"You can't, if you can't feel it, if it neverRises from the soul, and swaysThe heart of every single hearer,With deepest power, in simple ways.You'll sit forever, gluing things together,Cooking up a stew from other's scraps,Blowing on a miserable fire,Made from your heap of dying ash.Let apes and children praise your art,If their admiration's to your taste,But you'll never speak from heart to heart,Unless it rises up from your heart's space."
16
"Creation is a sustained period of bliss, even though the subject can still be very sad. Because there's the triumph of coming through and understanding that you have, and that you did it the way only you could do it. You didn't do it the way somebody told you to do it."
16
"She missed -- without knowing what she missed-- paints and crayons."
16
"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."
16
"Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic."
16
"The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form."
16
"I always said God was against art and I still believe it."
16
"This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got."
16
"How does one say in the jargon of musicology that my sould was pulled out of me and thrown up in the air, to be tossed about by the music. How does one say that I breathed, that I existed, in harmony with the ups and downs of those notes. What kind of notes both elevate and cast down, exalt and crush?"
16
"Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast."
16
"A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light."
16
"Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence."
16
"The highest duty of the writer is to remain true to himself and let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth the artist best serves his nation."
16
"Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests."
16
"Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-coloured chalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green, like the first fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness."
16
"The world is but a canvas for our imagination."
16
"Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic."
16
"Making art requires a degree of intentionality. All works of art require a contemplative individual drawing from their bank of knowledge and immersion into the realms of memory and imagination in order to make an outward, communicative expression. Only human beings can draw upon the dialectical tension between memory and imagination to create artistic renderings."
16
"The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them."
16
"For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited."
16
"Sometimes my hand starts to burn and I am convinced we are writing the same word at the same moment."
16
"The value of an artist is more because of his originality than his skill."
16
"This is why you use imagery when writing about sex, it's a means both of evoking immediacy and of distilling emotion."
16
"The humor section is the last place an author wants to be. They put your stuff next to collections of Cathy cartoons."
16
"I entered the literary world, really, from outside. My entire background has been in sciences; I was a biology major in college, then went to medical school. I've never had any formal training in writing."
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