Quotes About Art

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.

I must stop compromising my plays with this whiff of social application. They must be entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness.

HANNAH: Don't let Bernard get to you. It's only performance art, you know. Rhetoric, they used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It's not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat show. Bernard's indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on television.

In an age when the difference between prince and peasant was thought to be in the stars, Mr Tzara, art was naturally an affirmation for the one and a consolation to the other; but we live in an age when the social order is seen to be the work of material forces and we have been given an entirely new kind of responsibility, the responsibility of changing society.

My dear Tristan, to be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.

Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.

The Plastic People of the Universe played 'Venus in Furs' from Velvet Underground, and I knew everything was basically okay.

Your art has failed. You've turned literature into a religion and it's as dead as all the rest, it's an overripe corpse and you're cutting fancy figures at the wake. It's too late for geniuses! Now we need vandals and desecrators, simple-minded demolition men to smash centuries of baroque subtlety, to bring down the temple, and thus finally, to reconcile the shame and the necessity of being an artist!

I don't know of anything greater than the Appassionata. Amazing, superhuman music. It always makes me feel, perhaps naively, it makes me feel proud of the miracles that human beings can perform. But I can't listen to music often. It affects my nerves, makes me want to say nice stupid things and pat the heads of those people who while living in this vile hell can create such beauty.

Schelling's God is the totality of Nature struggling towards consciousness, and Man is as far as the struggle has got, with the animals not too far behind, vegetables somewhat lagging, and rocks nowhere as yet. Do we believe this? Does it matter? Think of it as a poem or a painting. Art doesn't have to be true like a theorem. It can be true in other ways. This truth says there is a meaning to it all, and Man is where the meaning begins to show.

His radio plays include: If You're Glad I'll Be Frank, Albert's Bridge (Italia Prize), Where Are They Now?, Artist Descending A Staircase, The Dog It Was That Died, In the Native State (Sony Award).

The Almost Free Theatre, the Fun Art Bus and the rest of them were phenomena of a decade which was simultaneously playful and desperately serious; and

After Magritte often serves as a companion piece to The Real Inspector Hound, which I think is appropriate in at least one way: neither play is about anything grander than itself. A

Only in art can empires cheat oblivion,..

The 'role of the theatre' is much debated (by almost nobody, of course), but the thing defines itself in practice first and foremost as a recreation. This seems satisfactory. TOM STOPPARD 1993

Don't let Bernard get to you. It's only performance art, you know. Rhetoric. They used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It's not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat show. Bernard's indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on television.

Literature is not always a voluntary act

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.

There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what pays

In a way, her strangeness, her naivete, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art from, she became dangerous.

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.