Quotes About Art

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can play weird-- that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple complicated is commonplace--making the complicated simple, awesomely simple--that's creativity.

Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

Anybody can make the simple complecated. Creativity is making the complecated simple.

My music is evidence of my soul's will to live.

Music is an art that expresses the inexpressible. It rises far above what words can mean or the intelligence define. Its domain is the imponderable and impalpable land of the unconscious.

Suppose that this reading of history is correct. Today's creative elites are not just overwhelmingly secular but often hostile to the idea that transcendental goods have any meaning. Such is the reason to fear that well-made entertainments are as much as we can hope for. Great art requires a source of inspiration that the people who produce those entertainments are not tapping.

It is a fairly general rule that the picturesque is based on someone else's inconvenience

But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.

A love of classical music is only partially a natural response to hearing the works performed; it also must come about by a decision to listen carefully, to pay close attention, a decision inevitably motivated by the cultural and social prestige of the art.

expression is always concentrated in the dissonance.

I hear you say: 'All that is not /fact/ : it is poetry'. Nonsense! Bad poetry is false, I grant; but nothing is truer than true poetry. And let me tell the scientific men that the artists are much finer and more accurate observers than they are, except of the special minutiae that the scientific man is looking for.

Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. But I observe that this satisfaction is limited to one's own ratiocination, and does not extend to that of other men.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

If the photographers are soul-thieves, whose soul is being stolen in a photograph of the night sky? The soul of the last one to go to bed and the soul of the first one to rise in the morning, perhaps? Photography is a black art like alchemy. It turns matter into spirit and spirit into matter. Still, there are moments when looking at a photograph of a night sky we have a hunch what the word soul means, what the word infinity encompasses.

The poem I want to write is impossible. A stone that floats.

Making art in America is about saving one's soul.

Charles Simic, when asked what he thought of Slam Poetry events: "They are fun, but they have as much to do with poetry as Elvis Presley had to do with Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk".

Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, said Jonathan, "once alluded to 'common observation and a plain understanding' as the source of all art.

That I isn't I anymore. It's someone else, the character who plays me, someone who's a better actor than I could ever be. I'm just the writer. Someone else is starring in my part. I remember him just well enough to try to write about him. A case of the negative sublime. I guess art's always after the fact. The real is imaginary, or imagined. Reconstitution, reconstruction, representation is all we're left with. Autobiography becomes biography in the end.

Lonesomeness. Morandi, Cezanne, it's all about lonesomeness. And Rothko. Especially Rothko.

Sadness was the driver, the motor of his invention, the engine of his creativity.

Here's a mystery for you. Renegade urban graffiti artist Banksy is clearly a guffhead of massive proportions, yet he's often feted as a genius straddling the bleeding edge of now. Why? Because his work looks dazzlingly clever to idiots. And apparently that'll do.

I went into the business for the money, and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can't help it. It's the truth.