Quotes About Art

My father's an opera nut, and my stepmother used to work at the Metropolitan Opera, so I had a lot of opera immersion. I like the grandness and pretention of it.

If I'm singing something I don't like, it literally feels like stepping on nails.

Well I never play back my music, just so you know, it's there sitting in my drawers and what I remember is that, what I can say is that there are steps, you know, moments in my life where I know that one score was a new chapter. I can say that 'Read My Lips,' by Jacques Audiard, 'Sur Mes Levres' was a chapter.

Exactly the same with dancing, you can't dance until you've learnt steps, the things your feet can do.

Writing an adaptation is not so much a collaboration as it is a series of steps. You're basically creating a blueprint for something else.

Like a film, dance steps or sequences are creative works. If a script can have a copyright, and so can songs, why can't dance sequences as well?

I'm proud when my dance numbers are spoken about for my expressions and steps.

I think that in all my dancing I play a role,' she told The Times that year. 'To me, that's what dancing is about. It's not just steps.

Every man should follow the bent of his nature in art and letters, always provided that he does not offend against the rules of morality and good taste.

There is an image stuck in my mind, but I have no words for it. It gives me no peace. 'Tis a queer backward way of making verse, like going through a door arse first.

Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.

Fame is the echo of actions, resounding them to the world, save that the echo repeats only the last art, but fame relates all, and often more than all.

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

As in nature, as in art, so in grace it is rough treatment that gives souls, as well as stones, their luster.

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; All Discord, Harmony not understood All partial Evil, universal Good. —ALEXANDER POPE, An Essay on Man

There are mysteries in science, and mysteries in art, but the greatest mystery has always been another person's deepest motivation.

The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskillful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.

No art form points like poetry to this originality of language as to its essential and abiding concern.

A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense.

I'm saddest when I sing.

Mathematics and Poetry are... the utterance of the same power of imagination, only that in the one case it is addressed to the head, in the other, to the heart.

The mathematics are usually considered as being the very antipodes of Poesy. Yet Mathesis and Poesy are of the closest kindred, for they are both works of the imagination.

[In a state of nature] No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.