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Art Quotes
"When they had hurried to the train station with their violin cases, they had drawn almost as many stares as they would on any normal day when their hair was to their knees and sheeting behind them like red silk. A poetic fruit-seller had told them once that they looked like dryads, and they did still, only now they looked like dryads who had tired of snagging their hair on brambles and sliced it all off on the edge of a knife."
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"If thou art a master, be sometimes blind; if a servant, sometimes deaf."
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"There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise."
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"Besides my great fashion sense? I play a mean harmonica."
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"The more we focus on who we are in Christ, the less it matters who we were in the past, or even what happened to us."
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"I don't get many hecklers now but answering them is an art form in itself."
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"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."
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"Art without emotion its like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag."
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"A poet is a verb that blossoms light in gardens of dawn, or sometimes midnight."
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"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."
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"Great writers create, writers of smaller gifts copy."
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"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
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"Music is a proud, temperamental mistress. Give her the time and attention she deserves, and she is yours. Slight her and there will come a day when you call and she will not answer. So I began sleeping less to give her the time she needed."
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"To become an artist you have to be curious."
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"With writing, we have second chances."
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"The value of an artist is more because of his originality than his skill."
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"In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up."
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"There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture cannot do but that are urgent now: one is that by creating a character in a work of fiction you can allow a reader to leap over the wall of self and to allow him to imagine himself not only somewhere else but someone else in a way that television and movies, in a way that no other form can do. I think people are essentially lonely and alone and frightened of being alone."
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"Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm."
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"This is why you use imagery when writing about sex, it's a means both of evoking immediacy and of distilling emotion."
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"My own general thesis was somewhat to this effect: that Artists have worried the world by being wantonly, needlessly, and gratuitously progressive. Politicians have to be progressive; that is, they have to live in the future, because they know they have done nothing but evil in the past. But Artists, who have been right from the beginning of the world, who were, perhaps, the only people who were right even in the beginning of the world, decorating pottery or designing rude frescoes on the rock when other people were fighting or offering human sacrifice, they have no right to despise their own past."
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"Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known."
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"And perhaps it was precisely because she knew nothing at all about chess that chess for her was not simply a parlor game or a pleasant pastime, but a mysterious art equal to all the recognized arts. She had never been in close contact with such people - there was no one to compare him with except those inspired eccentrics, musicians and poets whose image one knows as clearly and as vaguely as that of a Roman Emperor, an inquisitor or a comedy miser. Her memory contained a modest dimly lit gallery with a sequence of all the people who had in any way caught her fancy."
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"Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man's cruelty and baseness."
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"You sought to preserve your creative instincts and what would nourish them. But neurosis itself does not nourish the artist, you know; he creates in spite of it, out of anything, any material given to him. The torments and hells of [crazy men], are not for you."
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"The best art is not always the most popular art, and the most popular art is never truly the best art. The best art is that which is streamed through God. And the worst art is that which is void of God. The master artist of the universe is the Creator of All Things, and his reflection is in all of us. Only the artist who is aware that he is a reflection of that greatness, and that creativity is supreme love, is a true divine artist. Even if he is not the most popular artist, he will be very popular among the stars of His universe. That is the master artist, one who uses his talents to serve as a vehicle of God. In his work, you hear God's voice and see with His eyes."
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"To me, lyrics are harder to write when you have to invent the feelings behind them. That's when lyrics take a lot of thought, when they aren't genuine."
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"For most people, art is only valuable if other people say it is; and artists are only worthwhile if they are either rich and famous, or dead."
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"Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these things are justification enough for our hopes and dreams, although I wouldn't say that to a dying man."
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"Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time."
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"Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows."
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"For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power."
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"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."
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"Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic."
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