Quotes About Art

For irony—exploiting gaps between what's said and what's meant, between how things try to appear and how they really are—is the time-honored way artists seek to illuminate and explode hypocrisy.

Breasts are uniformly zeppelinesque and in various perilous stages of semiconfinement.

Ndiawar is bent to an open drawer. 'Your new art therapy person,' he says to Yang. Yang looks Day in the eye. 'Look, man' he says. 'I rotate three-dimension objects. Mentally.

But they're shit.' 'And yet at the same time they're art. Exquisite pieces of art. They're literally incredible.' 'No, they're literally shit is literally what they are.

Art soaked it in alcohol to toughen it up and draw out the water. (If he'd had the opposite problem—if the skin had been dry and stiff—he'd have soaked it in Downy fabric softener; I'm sure the makers of Downy would be pleased to know that their product makes even mummified human skin soft and fragrant.)

I hope the artist who illustrates this work will take care to do justice to his portrait. Mr. Clive himself, let that painter be assured, will not be too well pleased if his countenance and figure do not receive proper attention.

But oh, mesdames, if you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and tetrameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and every schoolmaster perish miserably!

You may hang your walls with tapestry instead of whitewash or paper; or you may cover them with mosaic; or have them frescoed by a great painter: all this is not luxury, if it be done for beauty's sake, and not for show: it does not break our golden rule: Have nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful

Art is the expression of man's pleasure in labour.

Niente può essere un'opera artistica se non è anche utile, vale a dire se non assiste un corpo saldamente controllato dalla mente, o se non diverte, ristora ed eleva una mente in buona salute.

Simplement parce les grandes oeuvres d'art, celles qui envahissent toute la vie, doivent résulter de la coopération harmonieuse entre voisins. Or, un homme riche n'a pas de voisins, mais des rivaux et des parasites.

Telle est la position de l'art de nos jours. Il est sans défense et fragilisé au milieu de l'océan de la brutalité utilitaire.

It's too bad for us 'literary' enthusiast, but it's the truth nevertheless — pictures tell any story more effectively than words.

All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.

This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.

This was such bad writing that it was good.

The purpose of art is to give the traveling human race an improved map that shows the way to itself. If art isn't for *that*, what is it for?

The real story can never be told. It is untellable. The real (as real) is inaccessible, being gone in time. There is no point in glancing at the past, in summoning it up, in re-examining it, except on behalf of art — that is, the meaningful-real. (The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952))

A poverty-stricken nation with a great art is a greater nation than a wealthy nation with a poverty-stricken art.

Wars, for us, are either inevitable, or created. Whatever they are, they should not wholly vitiate art. What art needs is greater men, and what politics needs is better men. (Something About a Soldier (1940))

You write a hit play the same way you write a flop

How do you write? You write, man, you write, that's how…If you practice an art faithfully it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.

El hombre es un documento, objeto de poemas malos.

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.