Quotes About Art

The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day--a way of relating .

Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?

Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.

Starting a novel is like standing in a field and waiting for lightning to strike.

What is technique but the absence of passion?

I've never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision; a complex of emotions; raw experience. The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort.

For isn't the artist by nature a revolutionary?

For, in movie logic, aesthetics has the authority of ethics: to be less than beautiful is sad, but to be willfully less than beautiful is immoral.

Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art.

You ordinary people who read and do not write, who 'like to read' and know nothing of the sufferings of writers, how fortunate you are!

Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive. There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.

The first sentence can't be written until the final sentence is written.

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.

so too, her glazed ceramics and her macramé are interchangeable with those executed by her women friends in the area, who take courses at the Mill Brook Valley Arts Co-op and whose houses are gradually filling with their creations, like ships gradually sinking beneath the weight of ever-more cargo.

Fucking macramé knots were maybe harder than they looked.

Poetry is what frightens. It is rare, and worth waiting for.

There is something about the act of studying an unclothed body, as an artist does, that allows a person to appreciate it as pure form, regardless of the kinds of traits traditionally regarded as imperfections. In a figure drawing class, an obese woman's folds of flesh take on a kind of beauty. You can look at a man's shrunken chest or legs or buttocks with tenderness. Age is not ugly, just poignant.

A masterpiece is never created in a hurry.

When the poem throttles your innards, that's when you got to hit the paper and arpeggio the keys—it's up to you.-Juan Felipe Herrera @cilantroman

Jerry: If you always want less, in words as well as things, you'll do well as a writer.

Sorry. Only one art heist a week for me, Dan said.

You take the shit; you make an art of it; then, you die.

Poetry is not business as usual.

I can't think when you're in here, he said. What do you have to think about? Making!