Quotes About Art

Communication is not only about words and numbers. Some thoughts can't be properly expressed in these ways at all. We also think in sounds and images, in movement and gesture, which gives rise to our capacities for music, visual arts, dance, and theater in all their variations.

Producing works of art doesn't often count as appropriate intellectual work in an arts department: yet the equivalent in a science department, doing physics or chemistry, does. So why is it that in universities writing about novels is thought to be a higher intellectual calling than writing novels; or rather, if writing novels is not thought to be intellectually valid, why is writing about them?

People who work creatively usually have something in common: they love the media they work with.

The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you're present in the current moment; when you're resonating with the excitement of this thing that you're experiencing; when you are fully alive.

I've seen enough films. I don't want to see any more. I get far less out of seeing films than I do out of reading books. So I've got about a billion books to get through before I see another film.

Burnt Sienna. Thats the best thing that ever happened to Crayolas.

Writing must have an element of magic to it. When that magic takes over, the writer himself loses track of time during the writing—and the reader will lose track of time during the reading. If you're happy at work and think of it as your own private briar patch—a place of escape from the world in which time is your time—the clock of life becomes your clock, and even the thorns in that briar patch are of your own choosing.

Discipline, not the Muse, results in productivity. If you write only when she beckons, your writing is not yours at all.

Music and language are a vital element. We, as actors and directors, offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves.

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

The best thing about conceptual poetry is that it doesn't need to be read. You don't have to read it. As a matter of fact, you can write books, and you don't even have to read them. My books, for example, are unreadable. All you need to know is the concept behind them. Here's every word I spoke for a week. Here's a year's worth of weather reports... and without ever having to read these things, you understand them.

W: You sound like that man on the Times who considers my paintings to be sociological commentary. I just happen to like ordinary things. When I paint them, I don't try to make them extraordinary. I just try to paint them ordinary-ordinary. Sociological critics are waste makers.

For the past decade, art historians Hito Steyerl and Boris Groys have written in favor of "weak images," claiming that in the digital age, a weak or cool artifact is more democratic than a strong or hot one.

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

If you yourself paint or write poetry perhaps, you'll know how it feels to want to produce something ad be frustrated; your mind sulks like the air before a thunderstorm.

Art is not to throw light but to be light...

Literature is what you write when you think you should be saying something. Writing begins when you'd rather be doing anything else: and you've just done it.

Japanese poetry does what poetry does everywhere: it intensifies and exalts experience.

Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense: The creative act.

Someone asked Rodin how he could sculpt an elephant out of marble. It's easy, he responded, "You just chip away everything that isn't an elephant." Chip away everything that isn't your point.

Ultimately, each of us will have to determine for ourselves who Jesus is and what he represents. For me, he is an artist of life, and what he teaches is the fine art of living. Perhaps this is my bias; perhaps it is not.

Just as a biologist cannot find life by dissecting it, an artist cannot find beauty by analyzing it.

Why are we so unhappy despite our material affluence? [...] [T]he modern world has lost the art of "ordinary magic" - the art of transforming our ordinary, mundane, and perhaps humdrum existence into a life of beauty and joy.