Quotes About Art

And all I'm saying is that it is within our capability to survive. I don't guarantee it. Prophecy is a lost art. And I don't know what the probabilities are that we will go one way or another. And no one says it's easy. But it is clear, as Einstein said, that if we do not make a change in our way of thinking, all is lost.

A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

The great radio telescopes of the world are constructed in remote locations for the same reason Paul Gauguin sailed to Tahiti: For them to work well, they must be far from civilization.

I know of no significant advance in science that did not require major inputs from both cerebral hemispheres. This is not true for art, where apparently there are no experiments by which capable, dedicated and unbiased observers can determine to their mutual satisfaction which works are great.

In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the Universe.

Dicho de otro modo, cualquier predisposición a la creencia religiosa puede verse poderosamente influida por la cultura indígena, viva uno donde viva. Especialmente si los niños están expuestos desde muy pequeños a una serie concreta de doctrinas, música, arte y ritual, es algo tan natural para ellos como respirar, motivo por el cual las religiones hacen tantos esfuerzos para atraer a los más jóvenes.

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-haired child.

A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one.

I'm a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry's poetry. It doesn't have to be called a poem, you know.

It was useless trying to explain to Cecila that poetry wasn't a commodity, that it could never be bought or sold, that it was, in fact, unteansferrable, remaining forever a part of the one who wrote it.

Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

You don't understand. When a life is completed, it ought to be put away. It's like a sonnet. When you've written the final couplet, why go on any further? You only destroy the part that's already written!

The artist's task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the Other, if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.

The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art.

If I had a theme song it would probably be "B-Boys Makin' with the Freak Freak" by the Beastie Boys.

Thus, I am here where poets come to drink a dark strong poison with tiny shards of ice, something to loosen my primate tongue and its syllables of debris. I know all words come from preexisting words and divide until our pronouncements develop selves.

If you don't think there is magic in writing, you probably won't write anything magical.

Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.

the artist can never quite get on terms with God, who as far as creation goes has got there first and pulled off a product hard to beat.

Language is a work of astonishing creativity. It is by far the most magnificent artefact humanity has ever come up with. It even surpasses the movies of Mel Gibson in this respect.

At its finest, it has produced work of rare insight and originality. At its least creditable, it represents little more than the foreign affairs department of postmodernism.

The work of art had nothing as vulgar as a social purpose.

High modernism is numinous through and through, as the work of art provides one of the last outposts of enchantment in a spiritually degenerate world. Postmodernism, with its notorious absence of affect, is post-numinous. It is also in a sense post-aesthetic, since the aestheticisation of everyday life extends to the point where it undermines the very idea of a special phenomenon known as art. Stretched far enough, the category of the aesthetic cancels itself out.

Hide the ideas," he wrote, "but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden."2 To accomplish this required great focus and economy of means on the part of the director, a rigorous and austere quest for purity of expression. "Everything should not be shown, or there is no art; art lies in suggestion. . . . Mystery should be preserved; since we live in mystery, mystery should be on the screen."3 He proposes several ways to achieve this end.