Quotes About Art

In short, Poussin's Louvre picture no longer shows a dramatic encounter with Death but a contemplative absorption in the idea of mortality. We are confronted with a change from thinly veiled moralism to undisguised elegiac sentiment.

Here the development has run full cycle. To Guercino's "Even in Arcady, there is death" Fragonard's drawing replies: "Even in death, there may be Arcady.

To create is to reflect the image of God. To create is an act of worship.

What is your idea of you? Who is it that you have decided to become? If your greatest work of art is the life you live, and ultimately life is a creative act, what life will you choose to leave behind as your masterpiece?

the only art we can create is that which authentically reflects who we are. Our soul is the material for all we create. Thus, to nurture the artisan soul, essence is far more important than talent.

Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears.

I'm free. I just do what I want, say what I want, say how I feel, and I don't try to hurt nobody. I just try to make sure that I don't compromise my art in any kind of way, and I think people respect that.

Music and the music business are two different things.

Artists need some kind of stimulating experience a lot of times, which crystallizes when you sing about it or paint it or sculpt it. You literally mold the experience the way you want. It's therapy.

There's all sorts of ways to live, Chip. Some of them you give a lot. Some of them you take a lot. Art, jazz, it was a kind of taking. You take from the audience, you take from yourself.

If it was occasionally ludicrous, it was always sublime. [Estelle Jussim on the 19th century Cult of the Beautiful.]

David Seabury's book The Art of Selfishness

He shrugged. 'If we keep pulling threads, trying to see which ones make the pattern, we unravel the cloth and left with nothing but tangles. Let's have no more talk of debts.' He cocked his head and studied my ash-smeared hair and face. 'On second thought, you do owe me the tale of how you contrived my rescue. May Lugh give me the art to do it justice!

Like dreams and works of art, fantasies are far more than what they appear to be on the surface. They're complex psychic creations whose symbolic content mustn't be translated into literal intent. "Think poetry, not prose

Writing is drawing, drawing is writing. Because it's the same gesture. They're close already.

It seems to me I write what I see, paint what I am.

The story I had written wasn't the creased, stit-smeared paper now sitting in the bottom of the trash can on the street. That page was just a pipeline through which I could transmit my feelings from my minds to his.

when an ancient text describes "worldly concerns," it is very important to understand that this is actually a geographic designation, not an existential one. The "world" really just encompassed the frenetic endeavors of life in the city, that place of hustle and bustle, lust and heartache, career and ambition, art and entertainment, government and politics. Deeply pursuing spiritual practice meant leaving the city behind.

To her the theater was never "show business." My grandmother would rise up out of her grave if she heard me use that word. She'd say "show--do you mean a circus?" and she would say it as if she were the Red Queen saying, "Off with her head!"

A writer's mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head.

You have to be telling people essentially "I love you," or you have no basis for your art.

Handwriting is a spiritual designing, even though it appears by means of a material instrument.

Art is never the voice of a country, it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.

We need to be virtually bludgeoned into detachment from our daily lives, our habits and mental laziness, which conceal from us the strangeness of the world. Without a fresh virginity of mind, without a new and healthy awareness of existential reality, there can be no theatre and no art either; the real must be in a way dislocated, before it can be re-integrated.