Quotes About Art

Patricia pensó que ni la mejor de las películas podía acercarse mínimamente a la belleza de la novela, ni al personaje descrito por el autor.

I've written poetry since I was in the first grade, and it wasn't until I was a little bit older that I realized poetry could be put to music and become a song.

Eu não entendo nada de pintura, não posso criticar. Mas o que eu gostaria de saber é que coisa o pintor quis mostrar com essa complicação... João olhou a tela mais uma vez: — Antes de tudo ele quis não mostrar a realidade. É uma das maneiras de fazer arte contra o povo. —

Mas dentro do seu peito vem uma marca de amor à liberdade. Marca que o faria abandonar o velho pintor que lhe ensina coisas acadêmicas para ir pintar por sua conta quadros que,antes de admirar, espantam todo o pais. (p.237)

Escola de Culinária Sabor e Arte… — Repetiu: — Sabor e Arte… — Baixou a voz, o bigodinho roçando a orelha da moça: — Ah!, quero saborear-te… — não apenas um trocadilho de mau gosto mas também franco aviso de suas intenções, deslavada plataforma, claro programa de namoro.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.

Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.

The loveliest tune imaginable becomes vulgar and insupportable as soon as the public begins to hum it and the hurdy-gurdies make it their own.

Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.

I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove... that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround us.

indeed it is very true that, just as the finest air in the world is vulgarized beyond all bearing once the public has taken to hum it and the street organs to play it, so the work of art that has appealed to the sham connoisseurs, that is admired by the uncritical, that is not content to rouse the enthusiasm of only a chosen few, becomes for this very reason, in the eyes of the elect, a thing polluted, commonplace, almost repulsive.

And yet the point of view from which his ideas on art had sprung was a simple one: for him, literary schools did not exist; the only thing that mattered was the temperament of the artist; the only thing of interest was the way his brain worked, regardless of the subject he was treating.

Art and prayer are the only decent ejaculations of the soul.

Goya's savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Esseintes. On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear that if he hung them up, the first idiot who saw them would might feel obliged to dishonour them with a few inanities and go into stereotyped ecstasies over them.

He wanted, in short, a work of art both for what it was in itself and for what it allowed him to bestow on it; he wanted to go along with it and on it, as if supported by a friend or carried by a vehicle, into a sphere where sublimated sensations would arouse within him an unexpected commotion, the causes of which he would strive to patiently and even vainly to analyse.

En effet, lorsque l'époque où un homme de talent est obligé de vivre est plate et bête, l'artiste est, à son insu même, hanté par la nostalgie d'un autre siècle.

The confused medley of meditations on art and literature in which he had indulged since his isolation, as a dam to bar the current of old memories, had been rudely swept away, and the onrushing, irresistible wave crashed into the present and future, submerging everything beneath the blanket of the past, filling his mind with an immensity of sorrow, on whose surface floated, like futile wreckage, absurd trifles and dull episodes of his life.

and, indeed, just as the most charming tune in the world becomes vulgar, intolerable, as soon as the general public is humming it, as soon as the street - organs have taken it up, the work for which charlatan art fanciers do not remain indifferent, the work which nitwits do not challenge, which is not satisfied with arousing the enthusiasm of the few, also becomes, by virtue of that very fact, corrupted, banal, almost repellent to the initiated.

He found he was now incapable of understanding a single word of the volumes he consulted; his very eyes stopped reading, and it seemed as if his mind, gorged with literature and art, refused to absorb any more.

Vraiment, quand j'y songe, la littérature n'a qu'une raison d'être, sauver celui qui la fait du dégoût de vivre!

Such an inveterate stupidity, such a scorn for literature and art, such a hatred for all the ideas he worshipped, were implanted and anchored in these merchant minds, exclusively preoccupied with the business of swindling and money-making, and accessible only to ideas of politics--that base distraction of mediocrities--that he returned enraged to his home and locked himself in with his books.

et, en effet, si le plus bel air du monde devient vulgaire, insupportable, dès que le public le fredonne, dès que les orgues s'en emparent, l'œuvre d'art qui ne demeure pas indifférente aux faux artistes, qui n'est point contestée par les sots, qui ne se contente pas de susciter l'enthousiasme de quelques-uns, devient, elle aussi, par cela même, pour les initiés, polluée, banale, presque repoussante.