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Art Quotes
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."
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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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"A poem is an event, like a wedding or birth."
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"Perhaps behind our occasional hostility toward the artist and writer there may be a slight tinge of jealousy. The man or woman who for the sake of family life, children, takes up work he does not like, disciplines himself, sacrifices some fantasy he had once, to travel or to paint, or even possibly to write, may feel toward the artist and writer a jealousy of his adventurous life. The artist and the writer have generally paid the full price for their independence and for the privilege of doing work they love, or for their artistic rebellions against standardized living or values."
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"The story was gradually taking shape. Pilon liked it this way. It ruined a story to have it all come out quickly. The good story lay in half-told things which must be filled in out of the hearer's own experience."
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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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"All the world is competent to judge my pictures except those who are of my profession."
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"Before civilization, artists painted for the living. Today, most paint for a living."
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"Give contemporary POET more SPACE & a long-last MAGIC will surround you all again."
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"[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art--novels, poems, plays, paintings or films--can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world."
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"A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not."
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"Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out?"
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"The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it."
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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 as the single superior counter-force against all will to negation of life, art as the anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, anti-Nihilist par excellence."
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"Nature has made all her truths independent of one another. Our art makes one dependent on the other."
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"Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us."
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"Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit."
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"In paintings, music, poetry, architecture, we feel the elusive energy that moves through us and the air and the ground all the time, that usually disperses and turns chaotic in our busy-ness and distractedness and moodiness. Artists channel it, corral it, make it visible to the rest of us. The best works of art are like semaphores of our experience, signaling what we didn't know was true but do now."
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"Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist--a master--and that is what Auguste Rodin was--can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is . . . and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be . . . and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body."
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"What makes Capa a great photo journalist?" asks a reporter covering a 1998 retrospective of his work. "We see his own appetite for life, his mix of urgency with compassion . . . the artistic thrust of his photography always had more to do with its emotional pitch, which remained genuine and deeply felt." Or, in Capa's own words, a great picture "is a cut out of the whole event which will show more of the real truth of the affair to some one who was not there than the whole scene."
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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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"It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. If you're reviewing a film and you decide 'This is a movie I don't like,' basically you can take every element of the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridiculous, or like a parody of itself, or that it's not as good as something similar that was done in a previous film. What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive."
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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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"The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art."
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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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"She [Mrs. Badger] was surrounded in the drawing-room by various objects, indicative of her painting a little, playing the piano a little, playing the guitar a little, playing the harp a little, singing a little, working a little, reading a little, writing poetry a little, and botanizing a little. She was a lady of about fifty, I should think, youthfully dressed, and of a very fine complexion. If I add to the little list of her accomplishments that she rouged a little, I do not mean that there was any harm in it."
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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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"I knew that, when writing a book, you're not constrained by a budget. You're not constrained by what you can do, in terms of the special effects technology. You're not limited to any particular running time."
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"The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'"
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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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"I think the art world... is a very small pond, and it's a very inbred pond. They rely on information from an elect elite sect of galleries, primarily in New York."
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"For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle."
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"The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head."
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"A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned."
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"Most critics, fond of subservient artstill make the whole depend upon a part.They talk of principles, but notions prizeAnd all to one loved folly sacrifice."
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