Quotes About Art

The writing of fiction is a dance between truth and invention

Thousands of ordinary people were part of this metropolis, but their homes would have been perishable wattle and thatch, stuccoed with lime and mud. Every trace of their living has returned to the earth now, except for the limestone temples of art and worship. The things made of ambition, which rise higher than daily bread.

Words only cover the experience of living.

Taking art classes on repeat, you learn a alot about color, but I can't explain that blue. You see it in photos of icy lands. Peacock blue in the deep center, shading out to clear on the pebbly edges....My eye kept going back to the turquoise middle. You so rarely see that, but children will color water taht way every time, given the right choice of crayons. Like they were born knowing there's better out there than what we're getting. -p. 531

Tig would have fit on that plane just fine. Tig, Art, Takis, these anomalous, scrappy survivors, might be the lucky ones. They ate less and took up less space: the humans of the future.

she is practiced in the art of creating a still life and taking up residence inside it.

Denied outlets for their creative talents in literature and the fine arts, women poured their hidden frustration and suppressed need for expression into the spheres delegated to them by the dominant male society. Needlework has been, in most cultures, a traditional female occupation. Spinning and weaving, sewing and embroidery…" Rachel

The story might sound like common gossip when told by another person, but in the mouth of a storyteller, gossip was art.

Robert Adam was the great architect of the eighteenth century, Emma. He built many grand and beautiful

the canvas the first time I saw

When you think you have made a mistake, think of it as an opportunity to make something beautiful!

Saturn Devouring His Son

Art's underlying strength is that it does not intend to be literal. It presents a metaphor and leaves the viewer or listener to interpret. It is giving in to art, not trying to divine its meaning, that brings the viewer or listener the deepest measures of satisfaction.

To act here is to face one's own complicity, to choose to take life in order that one's own kin might continue to live. When I lie down to sleep far from home, I place this small work of art close by on a folded scarf.

There can be no doubt on the basis of the written and archaeological evidence that the Christianization of the Roman Empire and early medieval Europe involved the destruction of works of art on a scale never before seen in human history.

original art is self-regulated; and no original art can be regulated from without. It carries its own counterpoise and does not receive it from elsewhere—lives on its own blood.

The study of art is the study of the relative value of things.

When a thing is put down in such permanent mediums as paint or stone it should be a thing well worthy of record. It must be the work of one who has looked at all things, has interested himself in all life.

The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet's duty to hold the line.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days--but not without poetry.

But it was the first time I had ever really used the place I knew and the things I felt in a piece of fiction, and there was a kind of dreadful exhiliration in seeing things that had troubled me for years come out in a new form, a form over which I had imposed control.

Art consists of the persistence of memory.

Remember that seeing is believing puts the cart before the horse. Art is the concrete artifact of faith and expectation, the realization of a world that would otherwise be little more than a veil of pointless consciousness stretched over a gulf of mystery.

I don't want to think too much about art, you see. I don't want to attend symposia, listen to papers, or discuss it at cocktail parties ... What I want to do is clutch my heart and fall down when I see it. (Mr. Nannuzzi to Edgar)