Quotes About Art

Infinite Jest' is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it.

The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves...The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes.

The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.

One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength.

Poetry, at the best, does us a kind of violence that prose fiction rarely attempts or accomplishes.

Memory is always in art, even when it works involuntarily.

La escritura mala es toda igual; la buena escritura es de una diversidad escandalosa.

Oscar Wilde's "beautiful untrue things" that save the imagination from falling into "careless habits of accuracy.

Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty.

Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.

The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.

Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes

Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value.

For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

Attempting to read many of the works set forth as resentment's alternatives to the Canon, I reflect that these aspirants must believe they have spoken prose all their lives, or else that their sincere passions are already poems, requiring only a little overwriting.

that the aesthetic is irreducible to ideology or to metaphysics

Whitman's art: to promise absolute self-revelation and give us fresh gestures of evasion, hesitation, concealment. Better thus, though Walt proclaimed: "I swear I dare not shirk any part of myself." Stevens learned from Whitman "the intricate evasions of as.

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

There never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art, there are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

Young ladies sketched, did watercolors, wrote short paragraphs of imaginative prose. To Alexandra, there was a distinct and distasteful difference between one who paints and a painter, one who writes and a writer.

Writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they're quite different from people who must write. From a 1964 interview.

Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all

Poetry is language playing with itself.

The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.