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Art Quotes
"Every mind which has given itself to self-expression in art is aware of a directing agency outside its conscious control which it has agreed to label 'inspiration'."
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"Art might be beautiful even though the artist is not."
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"A writer reports on the universe. When he presents his credentials, the gates of heaven and hell are equally opened to him. He can hear the devil's defense and god's accusations. The guards at the king's heart let him in. The writer can be anything and any one he wants. When he writes he is a god, he creates."
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"The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time."
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"Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake."
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"With writing, we have second chances."
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"The poet's mind is ... a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings phrases images which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together."
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"An artist should paint from the heart, and not always what people expect. Predictability often leads to the dullest work, in my opinion, and we have been bored stiff long enough I think."
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"I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work."
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"It's called being an artist for a reason, it's something YOU ARE. It's how you live. It's WHO you are. How you spend your life and what you leave behind."
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"BARQI: AESTHETICS IS ONLY THE LOWEST FORM OF PERCEPTION OF THE REAL."
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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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"Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one's reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse?"
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"Writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all."
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"Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations."
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"A poet adds the awe factor to our ordinary perceptions."
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"... endowing the imperfect and the preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity, all the melancholy which there is in love; guided the sentence that was drawing to an end towards that which was waiting to begin, now hastening, now slackening the pace of the syllables so as to bring them, despite their difference in quantity, into a uniform rhythm, and breathed into this quite ordinary prose a kind of life, continuous and full of feeling."
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"All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art."
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"The connection between art and Christ is like the connection between sunlight and the sun. It is, in fact, the connection between Sonlight and the Son."
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"A writer is one who communicates ideas and emotions people want to communicate but aren't quite sure how, or even if, they should communicate them."
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"Propaganda is that branch of the art of lying which consists in nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies."
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"Great artists are a little too gifted to be bound by boxes and labels, and in saying that, the label 'artist' is to be used lightly."
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"Art and works of art do not make an artist; sense and enthusiasm and instinct do."
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"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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"The essence of art is that its one case applies to thousands,' knew Schopenhauer."
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"All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent."
Art,
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"You can be taught to write " you can't be taught to be an artist."
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"When I discovered music - when I discovered the craft of shaping a song - my being fell into place."
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"Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon."
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"That's what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call "personality", or maybe even "pain"."
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"There is no difference between being an artist and being in love."
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"Science and art have that in common that everyday things seem to them new and attractive."
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"I didn't do music to live, I lived so that I could do music."
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"If you are going to hear the work of the world's greatest composers, you will have to allow for a little murder here and there. Those who want justice can go to the police, but those who want something a little more interesting should go to the orchestra!"
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"To be a poet meansto live with a permanent wound forever susceptibleto either the shade of the skyor someone's eyes."
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"When I draw I don't capture your likeness. I capture your soul."
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"Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity."
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"Film makes me feel less alone in the world."
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"And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, but afterwards you feel much better."
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"Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain."
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