Quotes About Art

The chef who cooks without a song on his lips cannot hope to infuse the right carefree improvisatory note into his art.

Nothing is avowed to exist nowadays unless it can be bought or sold or measured by scientists. Why should artists have to acknowledge the complete supremacy of materialism? Must everything mysterious be exploded or all unaccountable things explained away? And if so, what is gained? Plain men drudging in a world of plain things. That's not the world I know and it's one I've no wish to know.

And the careful manipulation of the occluding edges of clothing with progressive revealing of skin is a form of the theatrical art called stripping.

I write to reach eternity

Having a little talent as a writer is like having a little talent as a brain surgeon.

I'll tell you something, though. I did not hate the lurid dreams. The best of them had an emotional reality, a core of honest sensation, that brought me nearer to aesthetic truth than did the stuff that the literati were always fussing about. Art, I believe, is where you find it.

It has been common knowledge to informed collectors that many times the finest and rarest art glass is found unsigned.

Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.

I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.

Music without passion or soul is just a collection of notes, right?

Writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think you do is the day you lose it. Robert Frost called his work a lover's quarrel with the world. It's ongoing. It has neither a beginning nor an end. You don't have to worry about learning things. The fire of one's art burns all the impurities from the vessel that contains it.

All along we find that social life - religion, politics, art - reflects the stages reached in the development of the knowledge of self it shows the social uses made of this knowledge.

You have to wait for your mind to catch up with whatever it is it's working on; then you can write a novel.

The Bible is more to be admired than the Louvre Museum, and the Gospel of John is perhaps its Mona Lisa.

The instrument of leadership is the self, and mastery of the art of leadership comes from mastery of the self.

When an artist captures a mountain or an ocean on a canvas with color and we wonder where such talent could come from, he or she is declaring His glory.

His cassock is done in black marble and his face and hands in white, lending the statue a creepily realistic look. The Jesuit art historian C. J. McNaspy, writing about the otherwise magnificent church, commented, "The statue of St. Stanislaus, upstairs in the sanctuary, however, I find deplorable. One would have thought that the young saint suffered enough in life.

To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labor, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view.

The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter—perfect in its bud as in its bloom—with no reason to explain its presence—no mission to fulfill—a joy to the artist, a delusion to the philanthropist—a puzzle to the botanist—an accident of sentiment and alliteration to the literary man.

Oscar Wilde: "I wish I had said that." Whistler: "You will, Oscar; you will.

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

Industry in art is a necessity—not a virtue—and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work.

We look at a painting to know the painter; it's his company we are after, not his skill.

I would say that fiction is something you write in spite of the research that you've done, not because the research you've done.