Quotes About Art

Then," the girl continued, in a quiet monotone, "the individual applied a high-temperature pack to the forward leg—the right leg. The statue is a poured thermoplastic. When the leg became flexible, the culprit reshaped its position. Major Streiter now appears to be holding his head in his hand, ready to kick it far into the park. Quite original, and quite embarrassing.

Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's, and everybody else can fuck off.

I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.

You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.

As Auden is believed to have said, no poem saved a single Jew from the gas chambers. Never mind. Write the poems anyway. Play the music in spite of that.

The mind has plenty of ways of preventing you from writing, and paralysing self-consciousness is a good one. The only thing to do is ignore it, and remember what Vincent van Gogh said in one of his letters about the painter's fear of the blank canvas - the canvas, he said, is far more afraid of the painter.

No literary work longer than a haiku is going to be entirely without faults.

Besides, if you want to write something perfect, write a haiku. Anything longer is bound to have a few passages that don't work as well as they might.

Maybe art itself was a kind of voodoo, possessing you, giving you supernatural power, letting you see in the dark.

Hay personas tiernas y sentimentales, sobre todo en entre los más jóvenes, que se quedan con una muy mala impresión cuando les digo que yo escribo para ganar dinero. Les gusta tanto la idea del artista muriéndose de hambre en una buharda, que la pobreza se les antoja la situación indispensable para producir arte. Pero la preocupación [...] no es un buen estado de ánimo para escribir.

Hay personas tiernas y sentimentales, sobre todo entre los más jóvenes, que se quedan con una muy mala impresión cuando les digo que yo escribo para ganar dinero. Les gusta tanto la idea del artista muriéndose de hambre en una buharda, que la pobreza se les antoja la situación indispensable para producir arte. Pero la preocupación [...] no es un buen estado de ánimo para escribir.

Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!

Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it. Interview in Esquire Magazine 10/10

Great artists, as history reveals, have been harshly persecuted time and again by the frightened and ill-educated

There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of! And you will now be the person he is not living with!

The burden isn't that everything has to be a book. It's that everything can be a book. And doesn't count as life until it is.

We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

1314h.: I am now seated back in Deck 8's Rainbow Room watching "Ernst," the Nadir's mysterious and ubiquitous Art Auctioneer, 118 mediate spirited bidding for a signed Leroy Neiman print. Let me iterate this. Bidding is spirited and fast approaching four figures for a signed Leroy Neiman print—not a signed Leroy Neiman, a signed Leroy Neiman print.

This culture-of-watching's relation to the cycle of indulgence, guilt, and reassurance has important consequences for U.S. art

The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.

The only writer of the Middle Ages to describe cryptography instead of just using it was Roger Bacon, the English monk of startlingly modern speculations. In his Epistle on the Secret Works of Art and the Nullity of Magic, written about the middle of the 1200s

the root of the word 'art' means to fit together, and Artisan artists even call their productions works of art, all of which suggests that a thing must be useful to interest an Artisan, immediately useful, concretely useful, otherwise who needs it?