Quotes About Art

I came through folk music simply because it was easy to get into it.

I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.

Back then, I didn't have a big organization around me. I was just a kid with a guitar, traveling around. My responsibility basically was to the art, and I had extra time on my hands. There is no extra time now. There isn't enough time.

Art is short for artificial…so the art of art is to be as real as you can within this artificial situation… In a way it's a lie to get you to see the truth.

It's just that I suffer very eloquently

I was only a folk singer for about two years…. By that time, it wasn't really folk music anymore. It was some new American phenomenon. Later, they called it singer/songwriters. Or art songs, which I liked best. Some people get nervous about that word. Art. They think it's a pretentious word from the giddyap. To me, … the word art has never lost its vitality.

I never saw a sky so green, never so blue

Michelangelo's great perfect marble David cries out to its observer: "You could be more than you are.

The fact that a symphony ends does not mean it was not worth listening to.

The world is a very strange place, and there are times when the metaphorical or narrative description characteristic of culture and the material representation so integral to science appear to touch, when everything comes together—when life and art reflect each other equally.

Porque é que cada pequena localidade não pode ter um santuário dedicado a uma grande peça de arte, em vez de as peças estarem todas juntas de uma forma que torna impossível a quem quer que seja apreendê-las de uma única vez? Uma só obra-prima não é suficiente para uma sala, ou até para um edifício? Ter numa única sala dez grandes obras de arte, ou cem, é absurdo, uma vez que cada uma delas é um mundo em si e por si.

Movies, plays, operas, TV dramas—even the lyrics of songs—help us deal with our lived experiences, which are something different and broader than the mere material from which our experience hypothetically rises.

If you study art (and literature and the humanities), you do it so that you can familiarize yourself with the collected wisdom of our civilization. This is a very good idea—a veritable necessity—because people have been working out how to live for a long time. What they have produced is strange but also rich beyond comparison, so why not use it as a guide?

It is for such reasons that we need to understand the role of art, and stop thinking about it as an option, or a luxury, or worse, an affectation. Art is the bedrock of culture itself. It is the foundation of the process by which we unite ourselves psychologically, and come to establish productive peace with others.

Consider the role that creative people play in cities. They are typically starving a bit, because it is virtually impossible to be commercially successful as an artist, and that hunger is partly what motivates them (do not underestimate the utility of necessity).

In their poverty, they explore the city, and they discover some ratty, quasi-criminal area that has seen better days. They visit, look, and poke about, and they think, "You know, with a little work, this area could be cool." Then they move in, piece together some galleries, and put up some art.

We are dormant adventurers, lovers, leaders, artists, and rebels, but need to discover that we are all those things by seeing the reflection of such patterns in dramatic and literary form.

Art bears the same relationship to society that the dream bears to mental life.

Making something beautiful is difficult but it is amazingly worthwhile. If you learn to make something in your life truly beautiful - even one thing then you have established a relationship with beauty. From there you can begin to expand that relationship out into other elements of your life and the world.

Writing is so difficult. It's one of those things everyone thinks they can do, just because they can put together an email. But doing it well is another story.

The data on the economic utility of artists is really, really strong. Artists and entrepreneurs are the same people...and of course entrepreneurs are the people who provide all of the vision for the entire capitalist system. They're absolutely necessary. But conservatives tend to be so blind to art that they can't even see that the artists are the ones who drive the economy forward!

El arte se mide por lo que sientes al hacerlo, no por lo que te pagan por hacerlo.

Los que no sentían el arte, los que no se emocionaban leyendo un libro o lloraban ante una obra de arte, estaban muertos.

Escribir es el orgasmo contínuo