Quotes About Art

All forms of art demand a discipline that is not unlike praying. That lays a pipeline between the art & the truth.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

He evoked a Russia which was long dead and gone, lacked the range and urgency of his successors and, unlike these preachers, he was thought of - quite wrongly - as a painter of miniatures and, unfashionably, the pure artist. Yet like Dostoyevsky he believed that 'art must not be burdened with all kinds of aims', that 'without art men might not wish to live on earth', and that 'art will always live man's real life with him'.

It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.

In no other city can one so cheerfully enjoy the accidents of bad art.

Isn't simplification sometimes impoverishment? How to convey the richness of the message with a poverty of symbols. If we oversimplify the form, don't we kill the content?

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

In a whirlwind world, independent languor becomes a virtue, and meditation engenders a finer art than any nervousness

The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.

Shakespeare's plays and poems in their entirety amount to 5 megabytes, the equivalent of just a single high-resolution photograph, or of 30 seconds of high-fidelity sound, or of 8 seconds of streamed high-definition video.

Of course, drinking is an art, like lots of other things.

The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly he might have molded the clay.

It was as though she practiced some shameful art: black magic, voodoo, or poetry.

Ciencia, pero también arte, sobre todo arte; literatura, poesía como la de Virgilio que hemos leído tantas veces juntos: actividades del espíritu que nos hacen muy parecidos a Dios.

Rare and powerful harmonies exist, Shaping both scent and contour in a flower. Thus brilliance lies unseen by us until, Beneath the chisel, it blazes in the diamond. And thus do images of fleeting vision, Drifting above like cloud-forms in the sky, Once turned to stone live on from age to age, Held always in a faultless, polished phrase. ("A Sonnet To Form")

One of the most beautiful things to do is to paint darkness, which nevertheless has light in it.

What is drawing? How does one learn it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.

I believe more and more that God must not be judged harshly on this earth. It is one of His sketches that has turned out badly.

But in order to achieve that noble shade of yellow I achieved last summer I simply had to give myself quite a boost.

My interest in drawing has died down here in England, but maybe I'll be in the mood again some day or other. Right now I am doing a great deal of reading

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

The art of teaching is clarity and the art of learning is to listen.

Staying home is an ecological imperative, an ethical imperative. It is also a joyful option. It is the practice of oikonomia as the art of living. It is earth democracy in action, cultivating and expanding the freedoms of all beings.

My passion is doing movies, so as long as I keep doing that I will be happy.