Quotes About Art

Poetry is what you can't translate. Art is what you can't define. Film is what you can't explain. But we're going to try, anyway.

Properly speaking, the Renaissance is not a period but a people, moreover, a people without a boundary, and therefore without an enemy. The Renaissance is not against anyone. Whoever is not of the Renaissance cannot go out to oppose it, for they will find only an invitation to join the people it is.

Just as infinite play cannot be contained within finite play, culture cannot be authentic if held within the boundaries of a society. Of course, it is often the strategy of a society to initiate and embrace a culture as exclusively its own. Culture so bounded may even be so lavishly subsidized and encouraged by society that it has the appearance of open-ended activity, but in fact it is designed to serve societal interests in every case-like the socialist realism of Soviet art.

Art is not art, therefore, except as it leads to an engendering creativity in its beholders.

Art that is used against a society or its policies gives up its character as infinite play, and aims for an end. Such art is no less propaganda than that which praises its heroes with high seriousness.

If to look is to look at what is contained within its limitations, to see is to see the limitations themselves. Each new school of painting is new not because ti now contains subject matter ignored in earlier work, but because it sees the limitations previous artists imposed on their subject matter but could not see themselves. The earlier artists worked within the outlines they imagined; the later reworked their imaginations.

If to look is to look at what is contained within its limitations, to see is to see the limitations themselves. Each new school of painting is new not because it now contains subject matter ignored in earlier work, but because it sees the limitations previous artists imposed on their subject matter but could not see themselves.

Infinite play remains invisible to the finite observer. Such viewers are looking for closure, for the ways in which players can bring matters to a conclusion and finish whatever remains unfinished. They are looking for the way time has exhausted itself, or will soon do so. Finite players stand before infinite play as they stand before art, looking at it, making a poiema of it.

And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.

I drew a picture of Bigs Maloney. It came out looking like Frankenstein on a bad hair day. In other words, it looked just like Bigs.

Most books don't even come into the world with the noise of the still-born.

Watching Dad figure things out was like watching an artist paint a picture. He used to say an investigation was a lot like art, just a blank canvas and a whole lot of different colors in little jars. All the clues were there, just like a painting was already in those little jars of paint. But you had to mix them together and put them on the canvas right, so it all made sense.

Music is the highest art, no question. But literature is a friendlier one. It depends on us more, bores us more quickly, can't go on if we don't, can't stop saying what it means, can't stop giving us something to forgive.

Here the art of weaving pertains not simply to the art of combining and separating words, but to language formation as such, to what occurs as the generative function of language that mirrors the "becoming of being.

Ars longa, vita brevis," she whispered, a quote from Hippocrates. One of her favorites. Life is short, art eternal.

I remember the Inquisition, when pain in service to the church was raised to an art form.

Walter Isaacson's Leonardo da Vinci, which both humanizes the man and offers insight into his genius (do read

I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must remember that

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.

I wish i could press snowflakes in a book like flowers.

Light bulbs up the ass, no big deal!" you say. "On a good night I can fit a Butterball and two sweet potatoes up my bum!" Aye--But here's the rub: How did these bulbs come to shine so brightly? They weren't plugged into an electrical socket... An hour before her performance, Ida lay spread-eagle on the ground, and she had a helping hand (and how) slowly, carefully, millimeter by millimeter--INSERT A BATTERY PACK INTO HER UPPER INTESTINE.

As sung by Schipa, 'Che farò senza Euridice' is indeed the grief-stricken piece that Gluck intended. The true measure of its success lies in the word-note-tone relationship, where the art and idiom of the singer is added to the art of the composer in order to ensure the effective portrayal of human emotion.

Life is sad enough without people writing sad books.