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Art Quotes


"I do not read a book, I hold a conversation with the author."


"I was so impressed with the work we were doing and I was very involved ideologically in photography - that I arranged an exhibition at the College Art Association. The first exhibition I picked the photographs and so on and we had an exhibition in New York."


"Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents."



"The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote."



"Everything that is strong in me has gone into my art work."



"The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies."



"Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal."


"Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence."


"There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion."


"I hope we can keep doing it this way - making music and art that are pure products of our influences while not really having to let the whole celebrity side of it get in the way. Then maybe more virtual bands will come out and do the same thing."


"I owe much to mother. She had an expert's understanding, but also approached art emotionally."



"Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art."


"There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time."



"This communication alone, by the comparison of the antagonisms, rivalries, movements which give birth to decisive moments, permits the evolution of the soul, whereby a man realizes himself on earth. It is impossible to be concerned with anything else in art."



"I don't watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself."



"Variety is more than a means of avoiding boredom, since art is more than an entertainment of the senses."



"For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles."


"Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society."



"Unquestionably, standup comedy is and has always been an art form."


"I like to cook, walk on the beach, go to concerts and look at fine art."


"The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness. The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle. The creative urge lives and grows in him like a tree in the earth from which it draws its nourishment."



"A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with."


"Washington is a mean town where human sacrifice has been raised to an art form."



"I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us."
Art,



"The arts, as a reflection of human existence at its highest, have always and spontaneously lived up to this demand of plenitude. No mature style of art in any culture has ever been simple."


"Cubism is still the most important art movement for the same reason that John D. is still the most important Rockefeller."



"The writing that so thrills and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing right next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else."


"A writer should show the silver in his hands neither as bronze nor as gold, the gist of the matter is to show silver as silver."



"The Upper Bohemia people wore tuxedos in an art gallery, and Lower Bohemia was all of us."



"Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself."


"Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art."
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