Quotes About Art

Me preguntó si había copiado música alguna vez. Respondíle que a menudo, y era la verdad: el mejor modo como podía aprenderla era copiándola.

Ses progrès dans la géométrie vous pourraient servir d'épreuve et de mesure certaine pour le développement de son intelligence : mais sitôt qu'il peut discerner ce qui est utile et ce qui ne l'est pas, il importe d'user de beaucoup de ménagement et d'art pour l'amener aux études spéculatives.

Figurábanse que yo podía escribir por oficio, como los demás literatos, cuando jamás he sabido escribir sino movido por la pasión

mi trabajo desigual y sin arte tan pronto era sublime como trivial, como debe serio el de cualquiera que sólo posee arranques de genio y no se halla sostenido por la ciencia.

Young teacher, I am setting before you a difficult task, the art of controlling without precepts, and doing everything without doing anything at all. This art is, I confess, beyond your years, it is not calculated to display your talents nor to make your value known to your scholar's parents; but it is the only road to success.

However great a man's natural talent may be, the art of writing cannot be learned all at once. Jean-Jaeques Rousseau

To write a love letter, you have to start, without knowing, what you want to say, and end, without knowing what you have said.

I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

Pay For Soup/Build A Fort/Set That On Fire

If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you've got to realize that influence is not influence. It's simply someone's idea going through my new mind.

1. sports 2. opera 3. weapons.

Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour, she'd ask us, when in the same amount of time, I can do a painting that will last forever?

Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever.

Lori wanted Mom to try on the glasses, too. Mom slipped them on and, blinking, looked around the room. She studied one of her own paintings quietly, then handed the glasses back to Lori. "Did you see better?" I asked. "I wouldn't say better," Mom answered. "I'd say different.

Mom painted dozens of variations and studies of the Joshua tree. We'd go with her and she'd give us art lessons. One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. You'd be destroying what makes it special, she said. It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.

For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is enchanted with it.

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

Giacometti knows that space is a cancer on being, and eats everything; to sculpt, for him, is to take the fat off space, he compresses space, so as to drain off its exteriority.

Roquentin wonders if he could do the same as the man who wrote the tune. Not in music, but in the realm of art. Not a history book, because that is about what has existed, and existence is pointless, is not necessary.

Man lives in the midst of images. Literature offers him a critical image of himself.

A work of art is only a page torn from a life. It expresses this life, of course, but it could have very well not expressed it. No matter, for everything has the same value, whether it be writing The Possessed or drinking a cup of coffee.

The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.

Poetry is the work of the bard and of the people who inspire him.

With all its variety and liveliness, color acts in the work of art as blood does as it circulates through our bodies. Color is what keeps the painting alive and moving.