Quotes About Art

In the Roman world, Ovid's Metamorphoses – that extraordinary mythological epic about people changing shape (and probably the most influential work of literature on Western art after the Bible) – repeatedly returns to the idea of the silencing of women in the process of their transformation.

As you get up in the morning, as you make decisions, as you spend money, make friends, make commitments, you are creating a piece of art called your life.

Part of the task of composing a life is the artist's need to find a way to take what is simply ugly and, instead of trying to deny it, to use it in the broader design.

it seemed entirely possible to him that religion and literature and art and music were all merely side effects of a brain structure that comes into the world ready to make language out of noise, sense out of chaos. Our capacity for imposing meaning, he thought, is programmed to unfold the way a butterfly's wings unfold when it escapes the chrysalis, ready to fly. We are biologically driven to create meaning. And if that's so, he asked himself, is the miracle diminished? It

Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It's not just raw reportage flung splat on the page.

Mother—crazy as she was—had an exquisite sensibility. She read nonstop. Loads of history, Russian and Chinese particularly, and art history. There was nothing else to do in that suckhole of a town. You go outside, you run around, people throw dirt balls at you, you get your ass beat. But reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you're not there anymore. It's better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.

No writer can impose his own standards onto any other, nor claim to speak for the whole genre.

Pollock once paid a fortune for a Picasso drawing, then erased it in order to see how it was made.

Others can't stand to revise; instead they decide they're avant-garde, so everybody who doesn't like their work is unenlightened. (Note: being avant-garde is now... well, garde.)

Propaganda seeks to destroy art in order to sanitize culture.

I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow transcend the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down; how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger.

Joyce's Portrait of the Artist

No man but a blockhead ever wrote for any cause but money," Samuel Johnson said.)

paint was a soft, grayed-down blue-green.

Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

Poems arrive ready to begin. Poets are only the transportation.

Poems must, of course, be written in emotional freedom. Moreover, poems are not language but the content of the language.

Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.

Athletes take care of their bodies. Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of the poems. There is nourishment in books, other art, history, philosophies--in holiness and mirth.

Athletes take care of their bodies. Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems. There is nourishment in books, other art, history, philosophies—in holiness and in mirth. It is in honest hands-on labor also; I don't mean to indicate a preference for the scholarly life. And it is in the green world—among people, and animals, and trees for that matter, if one genuinely cares about trees.

These days many poets live in cities, or at least in suburbs, and the natural world grows ever more distant from our everyday lives. Most people, in fact, live in cities, and therefore most readers are not necessarily very familiar with the natural world. And yet the natural world has always been the great warehouse of symbolic imagery. Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

This morning the water lilies are no less lovely, I think, than the lilies of Monet. And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead children out of the fields into the text of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.

Discussing free verse if like talking about an iceberg, a shining object that is mostly underwater.

As music is present yet you can't touch it.