Quotes About Art

Obscenity is a notable enhancer of life and is suppressed at grave peril to the arts.

Suffering can precipitate creativity, liberating the creator through inspiration and then many available channels of human communication, and therefore there is value in suffering.

Each time I glanced into the rearview mirror, the black around my eyes was bigger and darker. Every once in a while Tom and I would look at each other with a silent acknowledgement that we had just worked our greatest match. When I think of it now, a quote from Georges Braque comes to mind: "Art is a wound turned to light." To my mind, that is also the beauty of pro wrestling.

I hate good taste. It's the worst thing that can happen to a creative person.

Get black on white.

Just as no significant work of art can be created without the element of irrationality that is in fact the artist's talent. p.179 He wondered if there was a greater distance than the one between two people in the same bed pretending to sleep. p.213

I am constantly reminded that we human beings are basically storytellers. More homo narrans than Homo sapiens. We see ourselves in others' stories. Every genuine work of art contains a small fragment of glass from a mirror.

You can't live with literary characters no matter how much you might like to. You can have them as imaginary friends that you can call up when you need to. One of the tasks of art is to provide people with companions.

Siempre hemos vivido para crear buenos recuerdos, no para olvidar. Toda cultura se basa en la conservación y la búsqueda de recuerdos del pasado y, al mismo tiempo, en la creación de nuevos recuerdos. El arte mira hacia atrás y hacia delante.

En los relatos de los otros nos vemos a nosotros mismos. Toda obra de arte sincera contiene un fragmento pequeñísimo de un espejo.

No será que hay sentimientos tan fuertes que, sencillamente, no pueden expresarse con palabras, sino que hay que cantarlos?

Dancing on pointe...Why don't they just get taller girls?

Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that not in literature or art alone. We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains.

If I could meet Rembrandt right where he had painted father and son, God and humanity, compassion and misery, in one circle of love, I would come to know as much as I ever would about death and life. I also sensed the hope that through Rembrandt's masterpiece I would one day be able to express what I most wanted to say about love.

Rembrandt's painting of the father, I can see three ways to a truly compassionate fatherhood: grief, forgiveness, and generosity.

I looked at the splendid drawings and paintings Rembrandt created in the midst of all his setbacks, disillusionment and grief. One must have died many deaths and cried many tears to have painted a portrait of God in such humility.

He supposed that, except musicians, every one thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore.

The jugleor became a jongleur and degenerated into the street-juggler; the minstrel, or menestrier, became very early a word of abuse, equivalent to blackguard; and from the beginning the profession seems to have been socially decried, like that of a music-hall singer or dancer in later times; but in the eleventh century, or perhaps earlier still, the jongleur seems to have been a poet, and to have composed the songs he sang.

This world is but canvas to our imaginations.

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.

Man is the artificer of his own happiness.

If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

To affect the quality of the day - that is the highest of the arts.