Quotes About Art

Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.

It is not] the poet's business to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to give to political statements the aura of eternal truth.

Poetry must be at least as powerful as music, but I am not sure that it is possible.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Art, in the sense of fine art, often is a kind of religion in our age, because it appears as a means of transcending society at a time when other means of such transcendence are no longer available for many people, particularly the educated.

Art has something to do with the arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

Art is not a democracy. People don't get to vote on how it ends.

The comic book is not the book. the graphic novel is not the novel. The same, of course, is true of films and television. When we move a story from one medium to another, no matter how faithful we attempt to be, some changes are inevitable. Each medium has its own demands, own restrictions, its own way of telling a story.

It was baffling. These creatures. They were fraught and frayed in their desire. A snake would never poison itself, but these folk made an art of it. They wrapped themselves in fears and wept at being blind. It was infuriating. It was enough to break a heart.

Satire is what closes Saturday night.

Art for art's sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.

Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

A habitual indulgence in the inarticulate is a sure sign of the philosopher who has not learned to think, the poet who has not learned to write, the painter who has not learned to paint, and the impression that has not learned to express itself--all of which are compatible with an immensity of genius in the inexpressible soul.

I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, untravelled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so mathematical, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it with humility and true religion.

Life is an art not to be learned by observation.

Music is essentially useless, as life is.

Science is the response to the demand for information, and in it we ask for the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.

Sometimes it crosses my mind that the things I write here are nothingother than images that prisoners or sailors tattoo on their skin.

There are times in a man's life when writing a novel is like taking an angel in his arms. When I wrote this one, ten years ago, that was how I felt.

Writing, someone said, is turning blood into ink.