Quotes About Art

Art according to art! Love according to love! This is taking the salt away from Heaven. Do you think Our Savior tries to make Himself talked about? He does not ask to be recopied. God cannot be deified without ridicule. He likes to be lived. Dead languages are dead. One must translate Him into all the living languages, and help Him to hide Himself to do good just as the Devil hides himself to do evil.

E foarte primejdios s? vrei numai ordinea ÅŸi s? nu creezi ÅŸi un fel de dezordine,în care sufletul s? ÅŸtie a se descurca,în loc s? se usuce printre linii moarte.

You know, he said, when you paint over something, everything that was there before isn't really gone. It's still there. All the layers of color, the scrapes and dents, even the bare wood hiding beneath, they shape what's painted top, inspire it even, but they don't define it. That's up to the painter.

He has. A fucking. Rothko. Over the fireplace

The decent man and the lover holds back even when he could obtain what he wishes. To win this silent consent is to make use of all the violence permitted in love. To read it in the eyes, to see it in the ways in spite of the mouth's denial, that is the art of he who knows how to love. If he then completes his happiness, he is not brutal, he is decent. He does not insult chasteness; he respects it; he serves it.

Works of art were not just the finished product, but the thought, the action, the process that created them.

But the operation of writing implies that of reading as its dialectical correlative and these two connected acts necessitate two distinct agents. It is the joint effort of author and reader, which brings upon the scene that concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind. There is no art except for and by others.

El amor es una gran cosa poética que es preciso no espantar.

No se es escritor por haber elegido decir ciertas cosas, sino por la forma en que se digan

Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic.

Music begins where the possibilities of language end

Music is, for me, like a beautiful mosaic which God has put together. He takes all the pieces in his hand, throws them into the world, and we have to recreate the picture from the pieces.

Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue had never been erected in honor of a critic

Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never been a statue set up in honour of a critic.

I need to feel strongly, to love and to admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe. A letter from a friend, a Balthus painting on a postcard, a page of Saint-Simon, give meaning to the passing hours. But to keep my mind sharp, to avoid descending into resigned indifference, I maintain a level of resentment and anger, neither too much nor too little, just as a pressure cooker has a safety valve to keep it from exploding.

What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsibile, who know the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside as well as an outside. And I think it means love.

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies

There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won't complain.

Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

The healing power of art is not a rhetorical fantasy. Fighting to keep language, language became my sanity and my strength. It still is, and I know of no pain that art cannot assuage. For some, music, for some, pictures, for me, primarily, poetry, whether found in poems or in prose, cuts through noise and hurt, opens the wound to clean it, and then gradually teaches it to heal itself. Wounds need to be taught to heal themselves.

Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.

Words kept salted when they cannot be found fresh. Words kept fresh when they cannot be found clean. The words go deeper, far out of reach of vessels, blood vessels bursting, that thick humming in the head. To find the words, just out of reach, beyond my hand, the coral of it, the pearl of it, fish.

The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.