Quotes About Art

What a beautiful art, but what a wretched profession.

Frank Lloyd Wright... his things were beautiful but not very functional.

As I went through 'This Progress,' one of two performance pieces by Tino Sehgal that transform Frank Lloyd Wright's emptied-out spiral into a dreamy Socratic-purgatorial journey, the museum literally fell away. I was suspended in some weird nonspace.

It is not like adding wrinkles to look older; it is using the wrinkles I already have to say something else. What is disturbing is not seeing more lines on my face but seeing that the range of possibilities of what I can do is much more limited.

One really beautiful wrist motion, that is synchronised with your head and heart, and you have it. It looks as if it were born in a minute.

It is difficult not to write satire.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

I look at you and I write down what I hear.

To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.

You never write a theme for a movie thinking, 'This will live forever.'

Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write 'War and Peace' in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.

Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible.

Camera lies all the time. It's all it does is lie, because when you choose this moment instead of this moment, when you... the moment you've made a choice, you're lying about something larger. 'Lying' is an ugly word. I don't mean lying. But any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.

I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them.

I am songwriter. I do compose the music of songs that I write in Bengali. But I've never thought of composing for a film. That's a different art altogether.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love, you'll never make it.

Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence.

You write to become immortal, or because the piano happens to be open, or you've looked into a pair of beautiful eyes.

You write a hit the same way you write a flop.

What an author likes to write most is his signature on the back of a cheque.

I write what I see; I paint what I am.

Anybody can write music of a sort. But touching the public heart is quite another thing.