Quotes About Art

Historically, women have either been excluded from the process of creating the definitions of what is considered art or allowed to participate only if we accept and work within existing mainstream designations. If women have no real role as women in the process of defining art, then we are essentially prevented from helping to shape cultural symbols.

In an interview after Just Roll Tape was released, Stephen (Stills) said: "There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature. I've had my share of success and failure at all three.

Making art has taught me that the tiniest smidgen of progress is something to be cherished.

When we seek daily spiritual guidance, we are guided toward the next step forward for our art. Sometimes the step is very small. Sometimes the step is, Wait. Not now. Sometimes the step is, Work on something else for a while. When we are open to Divine Guidance, we will receive it. It will come to us as the hunch, the inkling, the itch. It will come to us as timely conversations with others. It will come to us in many ways--but it will come.

We have this idea that we need to be in the mood to write. We don't.

Art is an act of the soul, not the intellect. When we are dealing with people's dreams - their visions, really - we are in the realm of the sacred. We are involved with forces and energies larger than our own. We are engaged in a sacred transaction of which we know only a little: the shadow, not the shape.

The truest evidence that any civilization ever leaves behind about itself is its art. Art never lies.

Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.

A person cannot live fully in mind without books and time to study them, without opportunity for travel and observation, or without intellectual companionship. To live fully in mind, one must have intellectual recreations and must be surrounded by all objects of art and beauty one is capable of using and appreciating.

Art gives charm and beauty to terrible things. That is the power and its glory. It is hard for us to accept the truth that art is doom - a harsh doom for the artist who survives in his art but not as a living human.

The clown performs mute rites, as poetry always celebrates some willfully silenced voice.

that the work may be defined as the poem of a confession

So when people said that the music or the book or the film was "good" or "bad," I usually felt that I just didn't know what they were talking about.

Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.

Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can't have a by-product unless you've got a product first .

The writers I admired and still admire were not carpenters, but more like sculptors. Their art was and is a real probing of real and troubling human confusions.

She was still developing her sundial theory of art, which would count no hours but the sunny ones.

Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can't have a by-product unless you've had a product first. It's immoral not to get in and work and get your hands dirty.

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.

Money is a kind of poetry.

The essential thing in form is to be free in whatever form is used. A free form does not assure freedom. As a form, it is just one more form. So that it comes to this, I suppose, that I believe in freedom regardless of form.

The essential gaudiness of poetry.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.