Quotes About Art

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

Words are the pen of the heart, but music is the pen of the soul.

I never cared who scored the goal, or which side won the silver cup. I never learned to bat or bowl; but I heard the curtain going up.

The most complicated skill is to be simple.

All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay.

Great children's books are wisdom dipped in words and art.

Taste is the common sense of genius.

Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.

There can be no forced inspiration.

Art can be a medium for people to discover universal spirit, with imagery not isolated to one particular wisdom path, but pointing to the underlying truth that they all transmit.

We love the imperfect shapes in nature and in the works of art, look for an intentional error as a sign of the golden key and sincerity found in true mastery.

I love my old paintings as postulates as fresh starting points but I have to destroy them. I have to make a new manifesto.

In trying to be perfect, He perfected the art of anonymity, Became imperceptible And arrived nowhere from nowhere.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, dance is not a universal 'language' but many languages and dialects. There are close to 6000 verbal languages, and probably that many dance languages.

But if "beauty" is in the eye of the beholder, so is "obscenity.

Long ago I used to mutter (as you probably do), "Very interesting," and cast a desperate glance around for the punch-bowl. This banal comment fools no one, least of all the artist, and you quickly find you have lost a friend and alienated a roomful of people, all of whom are pretending they like the pictures with a grim kind of appreciation.

The very reasons sometimes that you make a film are the reasons for its failure.

I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.

In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book, or goes to an American play, or looks at an American picture or statue?… Under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy, and sell, and torture?

If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music. It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth.

Because most artists have not told us of their intentions, and beacause those artists ( and patrons or agents) who have stated their intentions may not be fully reliable sources, and because we inevitably see things from our own points of view, think twice before you attribute intention to the artist [...].

Suddenly I've got an overwhelming desire to surround myself with the aura of classical and Romantic art.

I was very much into buying contemporary art, but I've just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it's not great art, but all of a sudden my mood has changed, and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.