Quotes About Art

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it.

Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as graveyard stones.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

You cannot write in the chimney with charcoal.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Writers should be read - but neither seen nor heard.

That's not writing, that's typing.

The process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing, let alone the success or failure that book may have after it is written . . . the book is merely a symbol of the writing. In writing the book, I am living. I am growing. I am tapping myself. I am changing. The process is the product.

Get black on white.

Just get it down on paper, and then we'll see what to do with it.

Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.

The business of writing is one of the four or five most private things in the world.

(Writing) - the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

I've put my genius into my life; I've only put my talent into my works.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

Anybody can find out if he is a writer. If he were a writer, when he tried to write of some particular day, he would find in the effort that he could recall exactly how the light fell and how the temperature felt, and all the quality of it. Most people cannot do it. If they can do it, they may never be successful in a pecuniary sense, but that ability is at the bottom of writing, I am sure.

You have to throw yourself away when you write.

You praise the firm restraint with which they write - I'm with you, there, of course: They use the snaffle and the curb all right, But where's the bloody horse?

How can you write if you can't cry?

Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces. Never will the world know how much it owes to them, nor what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on us. We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in sleeplessness, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthma, epilepsy, a terror of death which is worse than any of these.

For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth.

If my love for you can't be said in a posy, it can't be said in a library.

The scratches in Yoko Ono records are moments of relief.

So don't ask me how to catch Jes Grew. Ask Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, your poets, your painters, your musicians, ask them how to catch it. Ask those people who be shaking their tambourines impervious of the ridicule they receive from Black and White Atonists, Europe the ghost rattling its chains down the deserted halls of their brains.