Quotes About Art

For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him.

Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?

The proper stuff of fiction" does not exist everything is the proper stuff of fiction every feeling every thought every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon no perception comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her as well as honour and love her for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.

Perhaps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one hopelessly discontented with one's own work.

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?

The green garden, moonlit pool, lemons, lovers, and fish are all dissolved in the opal sky, across which, as the horns are joined by trumpets and supported by clarions there rise white arches firmly planted on marble pillars...

in this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow... (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house & grounds)

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom.

There was all the difference in the world between this planning airily away from the canvas and actually taking her brush and making the first mark.

Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.

He was afraid he did not understand beauty apart form human beings.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

Every woman, even the most respectable, had roses blooming under glass; lips cut with a knife; curls of Indian ink; there was design, art, everywhere; a change of some sort had undoubtedly taken place.

What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers?

Then beneath the colour [of the paint] was the shape. She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child.

And if literature is not the Bride and Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? 'Confound it all.' he cried, 'why say Bedfellow when one's already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means and save it?

She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly's wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral.

And that is the time to read poetry . . . when we are almost able to write it.

Music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at once. With writing it seems to me there's so much... scratching on the matchbox

there were masses of pictures she had not seen; however, Lily Briscoe reflected, perhaps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one hopelessly discontented with one's own work.

Y el poema me parece que sólo es tu voz hablando.

For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet.

she heard some voice saying she couldn't paint, saying she couldn't create, as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents in which after a certain time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats words without being aware any longer who originally spoke them.

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.