Quotes About Art

The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.

If sex is the sermon made of art, love is the lady of that tower.

Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one's reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse?

Las regiones apacibles y vagas en que me movía eran patrimonio de los poetas, no el terreno del crimen

offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual; and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise.

Unless it can be proven to me—to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction—that, in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, life is a joke) I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.' Lolita, Part II, Chapter 31

I notice I may have somehow mixed up two events, my visit with Rita to Briceland on our way to Cantrip, and our passing through Briceland again on our way back to New York, but such suffusions of swimming colors are not to be disdained by the artist in recollection.

Oh Mnemosyne, sweetest and most mischievous of muses

Oh Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe's and Bea Dante's, and

To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

One of the functions of all my novels is to prove that the novel in general does not exist.

I simply love that tinge of Botticellian pink, that raw rose about the lips, those wet, matted eyelashes…

Now the colored pencils in more detail.

Tenho de reproduzir o impacto aquela visão instantânea por meio de uma sequência de palavras, mas seu acúmulo físico na página faz com que se perca a nitidez da percepção global. p. 112

Vladimir Nabokov

Once transmuted by you into poetry, the stuff will be true, and the people will come alive. A poet's purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.

Para mí, una obra de ficción sólo existe en la medida en que me proporciona lo que llamaré, lisa y llanamente, placer estético, es decir, la sensación de que es algo, en algún lugar, relacionado con otros estados de ánimo en que el arte (curiosidad, ternura, bondad, éxtasis) es la norma.

Unless it can be proven to me—to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction—that, in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, life is a joke) I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

The cell was filled to the ceiling with the oils of twilight, containing extraordinary pigments

A writer is lost when he grows interested in such questions as 'what is art?' and 'what is an artist's duty?

only for great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries

Penso agli uri e agli angeli, al segreto dei pigmenti duraturi, ai sonetti profetici, al rifugio dell'arte. E questa è la sola immortalità che tu e io possiamo condividere, mia Lolita.

For me a work of fiction exists only in so far as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art is the norm.