Quotes About Art

Mikhail Bulgakov

manuscripts don't burn.

Aren't there enough plays already? There are such lovely plays and so many of them. If you were to start playing them you couldn't get through them all in twenty years. Why do you want to write? It must be so upsetting!

No, you mustn't give way. It's simply that you don't know what the theater's like. There are some complicated mechanisms in this world but the theater is the most complicated of them all...

Kitsch is the inability to admit that shit exists

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!

Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)

Love is poetry, poetry is love

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch. The brotherhood of man on earth wil be possible on a basis of kitsch.

Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock.

She knew only too well that the song was a beautiful lie. As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming as touching as any other human weakness. For none among us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

In the kingdom of kitsch you would be a monster

I'd never recited poetry to anyone before; I've never done it since. I have a highly sensitive, built-in fuse mechanism that keeps me from opening up too far, from revealing my feelings, and reciting poetry makes me feel as though I'm talking about my feelings and standing on one leg at the same time.

Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.

Beauty by mistake' -- the final phase in the history of beauty.

Extremes means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

Lorsque le cÅ"ur a parlé, il n'estpas convenable que la raison élève des objections. Au royaume du Kitsch s'exerce la dictature du cÅ"ur.

Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a vailed longing for death.

What remains of Beethoven? A frown, an improbable mane, and a somber voice intoning Es muss seine! ….And so n and so forth. Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into Kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

You seem to be turning into the theme of all my paint­ings", she said. "The meeting of two worlds. A double exposure. Showing through the outline of Tomas the libertine, incredibly, the face of a romantic lover. Or, the other way, through a Tristan, always thinking of his Tereza, I see the beautiful, betrayed world of the libertine.