Quotes About Art

I just wish the crowd I was associated with was more passionate about what they were doing and less consumed with the commerce of the art form.

more. I got my life as a gift. I'll give it up without an overdraft. Every once in a while, someone will ask me to look back on my career and identify the achievement in my life of which I am proudest. I respond by telling them the story of a great painter, who was once approached by an admirer of his art. "Which

Beautiful tone, beautiful heart.

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

I'd like to introduce someone who has just come into my life. I've admired him for 35 years. He's someone who represents integrity, honesty, art, and on top of that stuff I'm actually sleeping with him.

the poetry made her uncomfortable. It was too much like reading spells.

Art students didn't care whether I was from India or Botswana; they cared about Van Gogh, Gauguin, and the meaning of life. They didn't see me as a brown- skinned foreigner; they spotted raw sienna, burnt umber, and cadmium yellow shades on my face. They didn't stereotype me because my parents were Hindu and vegetarian; they reminded me not to blow up the studio while welding and cutting

the development of "female" art is not to viewed as reactionary, like its counterpart, the male School of Virility. Rather it is progressive: an exploration of the strictly female reality is a necessary step to correct the warp in a sexually biased culture. It is only after we have integrated the dark side of the moon into our world view that we can begin to talk seriously of universal culture.

The Zen way of calligraphy is to write in the most straightforward, simple way as if you were a beginner, not trying to make something skillful or beautiful, but simply writing with full attention as if you were discovering what you were writing for the first time; then your full nature will be in your writing.

This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner. Be very very careful about this point. If you start to practice zazen, you will begin to appreciate your beginner's mind. It is the secret of Zen practice.

You just pick up a chord, go twang, and you're got music.

I thought it was a little like writing, words freed from the mind, from imagination, free at long last. I did not think this a good recommendation for writing: to compare it to skull stabbing, but perhaps it is a version of that.

I love the freedom that the narrative form provides.

No one could honestly say that a musical makes sense.

The art of poetry belongs to life; one lives for it just as other people live for their essential vocations of whatever kind they may be. It is one's earthly home, and the other poets, dead or living, when masters of the art, are one's housemates.

Sometimes diaspora art expresses a longing for home, and frequently it tries to construct a collective identity out of its mostly heterogeneous reality.

Understood: language would end up falsifying everything, as language always does. Writers know this only too well, they know it better than anyone else, and that is why the good ones sweat and bleed over their sentences, the best ones break themselves into pieces over their sentences, because if there is any truth to be found they believe it will be found there.

Writing is a supernatural thing.

What matters is what we write: that is what we are, not some puppet made up by those who talk and enclose us in a prison so different from our dreams.

I feel such sorrow when I think how horror imitates beauty.

People can't put on an opera, but they can write a poem. It's accessible art.

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.

Art leads you back to the person you were after the world took you away from yourself.