Quotes About Art

My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry -- all literature in fact -- to the droppings of the goats among the rocks -- mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you...

Art like life is an open secret.

Don't Let That Horse . . ." from A Coney Island of the Mind. Don't let that horse eat that violin cried Chagall's mother But he kept right on painting And became famous And kept on painting The Horse With Violin In Mouth And when he finally finished it he jumped up upon the horse and rode away waving the violin And then with a low bow gave it to the first naked nude he ran across And there were no strings attached

telling over to myself/ how beauty never dies/ but lies apart/ among the aborigines/ of art/ and far above the battlefields/ of love

Like a bowl of roses, a poem should not have to be explained.

A poetry reading builds up to a climax, and if it's a success it leaves the audience somewhat high." —Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.

I didn't know that painters and writers retired. They're like soldiers – they just fade away.

The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it's the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it's a failure in communication.

viewing strategy as "the art of making use of time and space";

Lippmann entendía que la «persuasión» iba a ser una modalidad profesional relevante en los años siguientes, como «un arte sutil y un órgano regular del gobierno popular». Y añadió algo que en general se subestimó: «Ninguno de nosotros alcanza a comprender las consecuencias, pero no es una profecía muy arriesgada decir que saber cómo conseguir la sumisión de la gente guiará todas las premisas políticas».

The real harm of term extension comes not from these famous works. The real harm is to the works that are not famous, not commercially exploited, and no longer available as a result.

To be scientifically illiterate is to remain essentially uncultured. And the chief virtue of a cultural activity--be it art, music, literature, or science--is the way it enriches our lives.

A painting did not have to be beautiful; it had to be true. Then it was beautiful.

He knew what was going on in painting in this country in the Fifties and Sixties. Abstract Expressionism, Pop-Art, Minimal, Op-Art, Less-is-More, Flat, all the avant-garde idiocies. But Maitland paid no attention to it. He went his way. Traditional. Representational. If he painted a tit, it was a tit.

Music was my joy, my home, the one place I felt happy and secure.

Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities. This is especially true where the population is young, idle, and bored; where the art is impoverished; where entertainment—movies, theater, music—is policed or absent altogether; and where young men are set apart from the consoling and socializing presence of women.

He could easily invent an elaborate, plausible universe. But it is one thing to make that universe believable, and another to believe it. That is the difference between art and religion.