Quotes About Art

Each one, in my impassioned interior conversations, granted me some aspect of my most dearly held, most fiercely hidden heart's desires. Life, art, motherhood. Love and the great seductive promise that I wasn't nothing. That I could be seen for my unvarnished self, and that this hidden self, this precious girl without a mask, unseen for decades, could, that indeed she must, leave a trace upon the world.

Like a Zen master, she reduced to the essences: I do not need to walk around the Museum of Fine Arts; I do not need to be pushed around the MFA in the chair; I do not need the MFA at all, because its treasures, as I love them, are imprinted in my memory; and if they are wrongly memorized-a lily where there are tulips, the boy's torn hat rakish at the wrong angle-then this only makes the pictures the more mine.

No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.

music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light

There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth — an open-air art, boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.

But music, don't you know, is a dream from which the veils have been lifted. It's not even the expression of a feeling, it's the feeling itself

Art is of absolutely no use to the masses

There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.

La musique doit humblement chercher à faire plaisir, l'extrême complication est le contraire de l'art

Why'd you want to sing about sad things? Candy had asked him. Because any fool can be happy, he'd said to her. It takes a man with real heart —he'd made a fist and laid it against his chest— to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

Memory, prophecy, and fantasy— The past, the future, and The dreaming moment between— Are all in one country, Living one immortal day. To know that is Wisdom. To use it is the Art.

There are lives lived for love, and lives lived for art. We, happy band, have chosen the later persuasion.

It is great good health to believe as the Hindus do that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one s dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical. It is sickness of the profoundest kind to believe that there is one reality. There is sickness in any piece of work or any piece of art seriously attempting to suggest that the idea that there is more than one reality is somehow redundant.

I will say it one last time: Demonation! The feeling of it! There are no words -how can there be?- to describe what it feels like to become words, to feel your life encoded, and laid out in black ink on white paper. All my love and hatred, melted into words. It was like the End of the World.

I'm a poet,' the young man said, 'And it's my job to remember the sadness of things.

Hopelessness is reasonable. But nothing of worth in my life came of reason. Not my love, not my art, not my heaven. So I am hopeful

I don't like to make a distinction between the writer and the painter , finally , because I do both things anyway . Everybody's dreaming and trying to put down their dreams in the way that their hand knows best . I feel as much a unity , as much comradeship , with painters as I do writers .

In my Art I have but one fear: that we will fail to be fearless.

Memory, prophecy and fantasy—the past, the future and the dreaming moment between—are all one country, living one immortal day. To know that is Wisdom. To use it is the Art.

Si el amor se alimenta de música, seguid tocando (Shakepeare)

By and large I think art is made by people who have discipline married to talent in sufficiently large amounts to work even if they don't feel like it. Anybody can get maudlin and decide to write poetry at 11 at night; the question is, can you do it at 8:30 on a Monday morning..?

It was bad enough that these creatures had children and art; that they might also have vision was too dangerous a thought to entertain.

I wonder if the reverse is not also in some way true. That the artist is constantly working on an elaborate and fantasticated self-portrait, but at the end has drawn, unbeknown, a picture of the world.

Picture writing, as in Egyptian hieroglyphics? Very similar. What we might call an illustrated comic strip. Only without the panels. The panels were never fully deciphered.