Quotes About Art

Ma did a play called 'Entertaining Strangers' when I was about 14, which totally changed my life, I loved it so much.

Van Meegeren wasn't an artistic genius, but he intuitively understood something about human nature. Sometimes, we want to be fooled.

On movies, you have a lot of stylists that get things too pretty. Everything gets steamed and ironed. It's just not the way we really behave.

All writing is a sin against speechlessness,' Beckett had said. He would have stopped, I thought, if he could.

Do books, after all, change anything? For all their proverbial liberalism, have they made the world more liberal? Or have they offered the fig leaf that allows us to go on as we were, liberal in our reading and conservative in our living. Perhaps art is more part of the problem than the solution; we may be going to hell, but look how well we write about it, look at our paintings and operas and tragedies.

Glory, for the translator, is borrowed glory. There is no way around this. Translators are celebrated when they translate celebrated books.

A kid just couldn't see the difference. It was like being color-blind or something, or preferring Frazetta to all those blobby old paintings of haystacks and French people in rowboats.

Summoning up the images in my imagination was easy. Getting them out of my head and onto the canvas was harder. The hardest thing. Sometimes, I thought, the impossible thing. Often, I thought, the only worthwhile thing.

you think it's great, or at least important, or at least the best you can do, or at least the only thing you can do? You can't paint for the judgment of the future. I

I don't think people have been able to deal with the fact that African American filmmakers can make movies about life and relationships.

Toy Soldiers was my introduction to film. I certainly didn't think I was doing art by any stretch of the imagination.

The colors flow into your lungs, into your bloodstream. You are the colors.

It's the pointless things that give your life meaning. Friendship, compassion, art, love. All of them pointless. But they're what keeps life from being meaningless.

And as an artist, as someone who writes stories and tries to make words into beautiful forms, it's vitally important to me, especially in a culture that's forgotten the value of beauty. It's a primary source or inspiration, I guess, when so much of what goes on around you is only about money and big swinging dick capitalism. It's important for blokes to be able to do beautiful stuff, impractical stuff, that adds to life. That's an early life-lesson from surfing.

A man need merely light the filaments of his receiving set and the world's greatest artists will perform for him,

Why read poetry if you don't want to fall in love?

We see a seventeenth-century goblet and think: That is what a seventeenth-century goblet looks like, and isn't it remarkably like/unlike (choose one) goblets today? We tend not to think: What is a goblet doing there? Who made it? Where did it come from? Why did the artist choose to include it instead of something else, a teacup, say, or a glass jar?

photography was "a circus kind of business, and unfit for a gentleman to engage in.

Good pictures, Curtis explained, are not products of chance, but come from long hours of study.

All those artists and writers who bemoan how hard the work is, and oh, how tedious the creative process, and oh, what a tortured genius they are. Don't buy into it. . . . As if difficulty and struggle and torture somehow confer seriousness upon your chosen work. Doing great work simply because you love it, sounds, in our culture, somehow flimsy, and that's a failing of our culture, not of the choice of work that artists make." This

Leonard Cohen is my patron saint. Try "Dance Me to the End of Love" or "Famous Blue Raincoat," or pretty much anything else he's ever written, including, of course, "Hallelujah," his best-known song but really only the tip of the Leonard iceberg! Also: "Hinach Yafah (You Are Beautiful)" by Idan Raichel. It's a gorgeous song of longing for the beloved, but really it's about longing in general.

Creation is a better means of self-expression than possession; it is through creating, not possessing, that life is revealed. —VIDA D. SCUDDER, The Life of the Spirit in the Modern English Poets

The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler,

currency of the New Rich: time and mobility. This is an art and a science we will refer to as Lifestyle Design (LD).