Quotes About Art

Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.

Fundamentalism and art are mutually exclusive. There is no such thing as fundamentalist art.

The amateur has not mastered the technique of his art. Nor does he expose himself to judgment in the real world. If we show our poem to our friend and our friend says, It's wonderful, I love it, that's not real-world feedback, that's our friend being nice to us. Nothing is as empowering as real- world validation, even if it's for failure.

the Muse favors working stiffs. She hates prima donnas.

To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution. Recall the fate of Odysseus' men who slew the cattle of the sun. Their

the Invocation of the Muse from Homer's Odyssey, the T. E. Lawrence translation.

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got.

If we were born to paint, it's our job to become a painter.

Remember, the Muse favors working stiffs.

When inspiration touches talent, she gives birth to truth and beauty. And when Steven Pressfield was writing The War of Art, she had her hands all over him.

A Escrita é, no entanto, muito mais do que 'a pintura da voz' como queria Voltaire. Tornou-se a suprema ferramenta do conhecimento humano (ciência), agente cultural da sociedade (literatura), meio de expressão democrática e informação popular (a imprensa) e uma forma de arte em si (caligrafia), para mencionar apenas algumas manifestações.

Art must be inherently radical, but buildings are inherently conservative. Art must experiment to do its job. Most experiments fail. Art costs extra. How much extra are you willing to pay to live in a failed experiment? Art flouts convention. Convention became conventional because it works. Aspiring to art means aspiring to a building that almost certainly cannot work, because the old good solutions are thrown away. The roof has a dramatic new look, and it leaks dramatically.

What art does is give us the refinement, all the shades of meaning, of emoting, that we don't have language for. What fascinates me about that is we're talking about an art form in which your medium is language. It's almost a paradox that you're seeing. I want to give you emotion, that if I just relied on diction, I wouldn't have language for it.

the script and heard the score

pretending to do something when you're doing nothing is an art form in itself.

Emotion, we've discovered, is a sharp, smart force that organizes and elevates our lives. It is what transforms existence into experience. "I do not literally paint that table but the emotion it produces upon me," observed Matisse.

I tell you, there are times when words are so glad to be set free they laugh out loud and prance across their tablets and inside their scrolls.

The secret of a good lie is don't overly explain, and throw in one good detail.

In an interview, novelist Alice Walker says, You think you can avoid [pain], but actually you can't. If you do, you just get sicker, or you feel more pain. But if you can speak it, if you can write it, if you can paint it, it is very healing

The story quilt in the novel was inspired by the magnificent quilts of Harriet Powers, an enslaved woman from Georgia who used African appliqué technique to tell stories about biblical events and historical legends. Her two surviving quilts are archived at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

But if you can speak it, if you can write it, if you can paint it, it is very healing.24

As I painted, deeply buried emotions boiled to the surface.

Night after night, I endured these grand affairs alone, revolted by what objets d'art we were and contemptuous of how hollow society had turned out to be, and yet inexplicably, I was filled with a yearning to be one of them.