Quotes About Art

Art reveals the artist's inner self. Art reveals a man's ideals, what he values. Anyone with that much reverence, that much passion for the nobility of the human spirit, could only be a man who shares my passion for life.

Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet ... and yet ... Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from — hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in . He was fascinated.

J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it's big and up close. Sometimes it's a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it's not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.

Sometimes words need music too. Sometimes the descriptions are not enough. Books should be written with soundtracks, like films.

a metaphor ... is like lying but more decorative.

This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That's why everything is exactly the wrong way around.

Map-making had never been a precise art on the Discworld. People tended to start off with good intentions and then get so carried away with the spouting whales, monsters, waves and other twiddly bits of cartographic furniture that the often forgot to put the boring mountains and rivers in at all.

They say that the eyes of some paintings can follow you around the room, a fact that I doubt, but I am wondering whether some music can follow you for ever.

Her books on alchemy were marvellous objects, every page a work of the engraver's art, but they nowhere contained instructions like Be sure to open a window. They did have instructions like Adde Aqua Quirmis to the Zinc untile Rising Gas Yse Vigorousky Evolved, but never added Don't Doe Thys Atte Home or even And Say Fare-Thee-Welle to Thy Eyebrows.

More than half the skill of writing lies in tricking the book out of your own head.

Interesting thing, these fellows never seem to get the idea of perspective-' The Bursar thought, or received the thought: that's because perspective is a lie. If I know a pond is round then why should I draw it oval? I will draw it round because round is true. Why should my brush lie to you just because my eye lies to me?

Artists and writers have always had a rather exaggerated idea about what goes on at a witches' sabbat. This comes from spending too much time in small rooms with the curtains drawn, instead of getting out in the healthy fresh air. For example, there's the dancing around naked. In the average temperate climate there are very few nights when anyone would dance around at midnight with no clothes on, quite apart from the question of stones, thistles, and sudden hedgehogs.

the queen appeared as innocent as one of those mountains which smoke a little, and then one day end up causing a whole civilization to become an art installation

Typical artist,' said Granny. 'He just painted the showy stuff in the front... And what about these cherubs? We're not going to get them too, are we? I don't like to see little babies flying through the air.' 'They turn up in a lot of old paintings,' said Nanny Ogg. 'They put them in to show it's Art and not just naughty pictures of ladies with not many clothes on.' 'Well, they're not fooling ME,' said Granny Weatherwax.

Leonardo had felt so too. "I got her bloody smile right in the roughs," he told Crowley, sipping cold wine in the lunchtime sun, "but it went all over the place when I painted it. Her husband had a few things to say about it when I delivered it, but, like I tell him, Signor del Giocondo, apart from you, who's going to see it?

There was practically nothing that he wouldn't attack, including architecture.

Drunkenness had this to be said for it, it stopped the flow of inspirations.

To write," Marguerite Duras remarked, "is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly.

I wonder how it is we have come to this place in our society where art and nature are spoke in terms of what is optional, the pastime and concern of the elite?

People talk about medium. What is your medium? My medium as a writer has been dirt, clay, sand--what I could touch, hold, stand on, and stand for--Earth. My medium has been Earth. Earth in correspondence with my mind.

There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private.

A pencil is a wand and a weapon. Be careful. Protect yourself. It can be glorious.

She loved the classics and believed in reading out loud.

The Reformation was a movement that broke the bubble that held the Middle Ages in place. . . . El Bosco painted his Garden on the threshold of this leap.