Quotes About Art

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

Poetry is the subject of the poem.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.

A change of style is a change of meaning.

A poem is a meteor.

Poetry is the scholar's art.

unreal things have a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere.

They said"You have a blue guitar You do not play things as they are". The man replied,"things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar".

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

The statement that the process does not involve the poet as subject, to the extent to which that is true, precludes direct egotism. On the other hand, without indirect egotism there can be no poetry. There can be no poetry without the personality of the poet, and that, quite simply, is why the definition of poetry has not been found and why, in short, there is none.

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully.

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin.

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.

I never called my work an 'art'. It's part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be…. The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

The products of art and science owe their existence not merely to the effort of the great geniuses that created them, but also to the unnamed drudgery of their contemporaries. There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.