Quotes About Art

It is only the city dweller spending his weekends in the country who goes into raptures about nature; the farmer breathes in it. It is only the uncreative critic who is given to much talking about art. For the artist himself, his art is speech sufficient. It is only a motherless time that cries out for a mother, and a deeply unmotherly age that can point to the mother as a demand of the time, for it is precisely the mother who is timeless, the same in all epochs and among all peoples.

Sculpture is made with two instruments and some supports and pretty air.

The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.

Remarks are not literature [said to Hemingway].

I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

The first hope of a painter who feels hopeful about painting is the hope that the painting will move, that it will live outside its frame.

As Christians our task is to mirror the divine artist as faithfully as possible. Aquinas, like his fellow thinkers, equates imagination with fantasy. He affirms the mediating function of the imagination between mind and body and perceives it as `a treasure-store of forms received through the senses

My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite.

Rhetoric makes use of nature's secrets in the same way as painters who try to imitate it: their most beautiful work is false.

Everything since Homer has improved, except poetry.

Reason is the enemy of all greatness: reason is the enemy of nature: nature is great, reason is small. I mean that it will be more or less difficult for a man to be great the more he is governed by reason, that few can be great (and in art and poetry perhaps no one) unless they are governed by illusions.

Non solamente bisogna che il poeta imiti e dipinga a perfezione la natura, ma anche che la imiti e dipinga con naturalezza, anzi non imita la natura chi non la imita con naturalezza.

Le altre arti imitano ed esprimono la natura da cui si trae il sentimento, ma la musica non imita e non esprime che lo stesso sentimento in persona, ch'ella trae da se stessa e non dalla natura, e così l'uditore.

Dalla lettura di un pezzo di vera, contemporanea poesia, in versi o in prosa (ma più efficace impressione è quella de' versi), si può, e forse meglio (anche in questi sì prosaici tempi), dir quello che di un sorriso diceva lo Sterne: che essa aggiunge un filo alla tela brevissima della nostra vita.

Tutto si è perfezionato da Omero in poi, ma non la poesia.

What poets must seem to display, besides the objects imitated, is a beautiful negligence.

Vissi d'arte, vissi d'amore, non feci mai male ad anima viva!

los hombres mueren y los gobiernos cambian, pero las canciones de La Bohéme vivirán siempre. Thomas Alva edison

In every [other] pursuit men without natural aptitude succeed by obstinate study of technique, but who is not a poet by nature can never become one by art.

Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers - and never succeeding.

Luis Bunuel made great movies.

The design of a dress, furniture, a house, a room, a street and a city are all the same process.

I like the body. I like to design everything to do with the body.