Quotes About Art

There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.

Your work should be an act of love, not a marriage of convenience.

The best musicians transpose consciousness into sound; painters do the same for color and shape.

Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness.

People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you might strike out, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That's what can move the world. That's art.

A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.

People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you can forget, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That's what can move the world. That's art.

I love pop culture -- the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That's why I said I don't like elitism.

That's how it is with art. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning are incapable of such writing.

Writing things was important, wasn't it? Nakata asked. 'Yes, it was. The process of writing was important. Even though the finished product is completely meaningless.

As Duke Ellington once said, "There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind." In that sense, jazz and classical music are fundamentally the same. The pure joy one experiences listening to "good" music transcends questions of genre.

Beethoven, he learned, was a proud man who believed absolutely in his own abilities and never bothered to flatter the nobility. Believing that art itself, and the proper expression of emotions, was the most SUBLIME thing in the world, he thought political power and wealth only served one purpose: to make art possible.

I love music, but I can't sing a note.

If I can draw you the right way, maybe you'll be able to see yourself through my eyes, I said, If all goes well, of course. That's why we needs pictures. You're right--that's why we need pictures. Or literature, or music, or anything of that sort.

It was as if he felt that the black symbols flowing from his brush onto the pure white paper could somehow lay bare the workings of his heart.

Opera lovers may be the narrowest people in the world.

writing was like breathing.

If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of - that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally, I feel that encouraging. Do you know what I'm getting at?

Music is my longtime friend. And I could never betray it. I listen to music while I'm writing.

There's no such thing as a perfect piece of writing. Just as there's no such thing as perfect despair.

Works that have a certain imperfection to them have an appeal for that very reason—or at least they appeal to certain types of people. Just like you're attracted to Soseki's The Miner. There's something in it that draws you in, more than more fully realized novels like Kokoro or Sanshiro. You discover something about that work that tugs at your heart—or maybe we should say the work discovers you. Schubert's Sonata in D Major is sort of the same thing.

Most of these university types are total phonies. They're scared to death somebody's gonna find out they don't know something. They all read the same books and they all throw around the same words, and they get off listening to John Coltrane and seeing Pasolini movies.

So called art films. Movies like that never explained what was going on. Explanations were rejected as some kind of evil that could only destroy the films reality.

In the middle distance, sails were gliding like butterflies, and farther away, ships dotted the mouth of the bay between Awa and Sagami as if brushed in ink in a single flowing stroke.