Quotes About Art

I have not written here out of imagination and invention, but out of meditation and memoy. No doubt my memory has the usual partiality of the individual, and is not entirely trustworthy. Still, I have been loyal here to the experiences of my own life and not, as is required in the more designed arts, to the needs of the line or the paragraph.

Beauty can both shout and whisper, and still it explains nothing.

I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak—to be company.

Existe la vida y existe la ópera, y yo quiero las dos cosas.

A poem that is composed without the sweet and correct formalities of language, which are what sets it apart from the dailiness of ordinary writing, is doomed. It will not fly. It will be raucous and sloppy—the work of an amateur.

Nature there will always be, but it will not be what we have now, much less the deeper fields and woodlands many of us remember from our childhood. The worlds of van Gogh and Turner and Winslow Homer, and Wordsworth too, and Frost and Jeffers and Whitman, are gone, and will not return. We can come to our senses yet, and rescue the world, but we will never return it to anything like its original form.

What do 'civilization' and 'monks' mean?" asked Annie. "I think civilization is when people have books and art and good manners," said Jack.

Take it," he said. "Are you sure?" Jack asked. He knew it was Brother Michael's life's work. "Please," said Brother Michael. "It is better that the world should have some of it than none at all. Just in case…

page and stared at Annie's sparkly drawing of the

I wish to work miracles. - from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci

I get ideas for my paintings from everything! I look at a watermark on a wall and see an old woman's face. I look at a food stain on my tablecloth and see a horse! I study rain puddles and rocks and see oceans and mountains! (p.36)

Dr. Grime carries a Tide stain pen. He does not use his own spit. Art conservators do. "We make cotton swabs on bamboo sticks and moisten the swab in our mouths," says Andrea Chevalier, senior paintings conservator with the Intermuseum Conservation Association.

It's just that there are other ways to spend your time as a cadaver. Get involved with science. Be an art exhibit. Become part of a tree. Some options for you to think about. Death. It doesn't have to be boring.

He was a being formed in the very poetry of nature

I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true, but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling.

Fine art is something wonderful that's left long into the future ... eternal beauty.

Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.

A pataphor is an extreme form of metaphor that is used to express excitement. For example, "She swam with such grace that the water was left undisturbed by her tail." This pataphor describes a girl who swims as gracefully as a fish. Be

Cities, marriage, language, music, art – these manifestations of culture all change in regular and retrospectively predictable ways, but in ways that nobody did predict, let alone direct. They evolve.

The virtuosity and visual humor of people like A.B. Frost, T.S. Sullivant, and [Thomas] Nast of course, have so much depth and innate humor that I couldn't really resist cross hatching. Later day cross-hatchers like Ron Cobb and Bill Plympton were also early influences. (from an interview in Attitude, 2002)

Art still has truth. Take refuge there.

Illustration is to cartooning as prison sodomy is to pansexual orgy.

Amare una persona è diverso dal volerla intrappolare, dal volere qualcosa che sia tuo e solo tuo. E' come tentare di abbracciare il tuo quadro preferito, come parlare o danzare con l'ora più perfetta della giornata, con il ricordo dell'albero più bello che hai mai visto.

Writers must write and they suffer if they don't. Then they suffer if they do.