Quotes About Art

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life... and hold it fixed so that 100 years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again.

If a story is in you, it has got to come out.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move.

Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency . . . to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich.

And not only an architect, as General Compson said, but an artist since only an artist could have borne those two years in order to build a house which he doubtless not only expected but firmly intended never to see again.

The work of the artist is to lift up people's hearts and help them endure.

A novelist is a failed short story writer, and a short story writer is a failed poet.

In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior; in America, being an artist is an excuse for a form of behavior.

Don't be a writer; be writing.

In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior; in America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.

the face of Christ in your van der Goes, no one could call that a lie.

She paints some, Stanley said in a vindicatory tone. -Paints! Did you see the abstract she did for the Army Air Force? the face persisted. -For a psychological test, they used it to pick out the queers, if you were queer the painting didn't look like anything, if you weren't it looked like a snatch.

She can paint herself red and hang on the wall and whistle, I don't care

every work of art is a work of perfect necessity.

The room was empty, aside from the wide pink bedslab and two nylon bags, new and identical, that lay beside it. Blank walls, no windows, a single white-painted steel firedoor. The walls were coated with countless layers of white latex paint. Factory space. He knew this kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate in the interzone where art wasn't quite crime, crime not quite art.

I had read and admired Ballard and Burroughs, and I thought of them as very powerful effect pedals. You get to a certain place in the story and you just step on the Ballard.

Reality television. It merged with politics. Then with performance art." They walked on. "I think that already happened, back home

Aubrey Beardsley.

Are you—are you sad?" —No. "But your—your songs are sad." —My songs are of time and distance. The sadness is in you. Watch my arms. There is only the dance. These things you treasure are shells. "I—I knew that. Once.

She'd yet to see a book in any Bigendian environment. He was a creature of screens, of bare expanses of desk or table, empty shelves. He owned, as far as she knew, no art. In some way, she suspected, he regarded it as competition, noise to his signal.

It was sometimes best, when you came to the mystery that was art, to come as a child. The child saw things that were too evident, too obvious for the trained eye.

her gaze had tracked the brass plaque automatically—"La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même.