Quotes About Art

To her credit, though, Trace didn't lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman's art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use.

Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self.

Novels are what I know, and the novel door in my personality is always open.

It's a part of what art is here to imagine for us and with us. (I'm a sentimental humanist: I believe art is here to help, even if the help is painful—especially then.)

fiction can't be written to comply with winning arguments.

when you're writing it's such an obsessive thing, and then when you're done it's like pushing something out of your body (...)

Sometimes it is when we stop trying to understand or interrogate apparently 'absurd' phenomena - like the category of the 'new' in art- that we become more open to them.

This is what I understood by it: that for Astaire the person in the film was not especially connected with him.

Writing is routinely described as creative —this has never struck me as a correct word. Planting tulips is creative. To plant a bulb(I imagine, I've never done it) is to participate in some small way in the cyclic miracle of creation. Writing is control.

many learned things can be said about the Venus of Urbino but if you don't open your eyes and recognize her first and foremost as an erotic object how can you claim that you've seen her at all?

Yes, you could make something ornamental. That's your freedom! Take it! Who knows? You might be the next Augusta Savage!" I

It's a delusional painter who finishes a canvas at two o'clock and expects radical societal transformation by four. Even when artists write manifestos, they are (hopefully) aware that their exigent tone is, finally, borrowed, only echoing in mimicking the urgency of the guerrilla's demands, or the activist's protest, rather than truly enacting. The people sometimes demand change.

no geographic or racial qualification guarantees a writer her subject. Baldwin's pedigree didn't gift him The Jimmy. Only interest, knowledge and love will do that...

The art of mid-life is surely always cloudier than the art of youth, as life itself gets cloudier.

Portnoy was not Roth and he was not real, but in him is enshrined a genuine Rothian freedom, created by Roth, once impossible, now fully realized, a freedom which anyone can now easily access. You don't even have to read the book: you are already living in the world that Portnoy touched and changed.

I'm a sentimental humanist: I believe art is here to help, even if the help is painful—especially then.)

Finally, it was time to go. At the doorway he said, as if it had just occurred to him: I don't understand how you can live here, and be an artist, among all this social noise and all of these people.

certainly don't write as a public service. But I am aware, at least as a reader, that remarkable acts of art-making—bold, perverse, unbeholden, free—have had the side effect of changing the weather in a country, in a people, at a certain historical moment, and finally in me, conferring freedoms for which I am now very grateful.

I do think art can and often does offer models of behavior, or at least suggests possibilities of behavior, but I dislike the aspirational tone of 'role model.' Roth's gift with Portnoy was large precisely because it had no aspirational element and no precise directions. Like any good gift, the less strings we find attached to it the better. The offer was not: You, too, can be like Portnoy. The offer was: Portnoy exists! Be as you please.

Although the most powerful art, it sometimes seems to me, it's an experience and a going-through; it is love comprehended by, expressed and enacted through the artwork itself, and for this reason has perhaps been more frequently created by people who feel themselves to be completely alone in this world —and therefore wholly focused on the task at hand— than by those surrounded by loved ones.

I do think art can and often does offer models of behavior, or at least suggests possibilities of behavior, but I dislike the aspirational tone of 'role model.' Roth's gift with Portnoy was large precisely because it had no aspirational element and no precise directions. Like any good gift, the less strings we find attached to it the better. The offer was not: The offer was: Portnoy exists! Be as you please.

In America we are perhaps more accustomed to art that enacts the boredom of life with a side order of that (by now) overfamiliar Warholian nihilism.

He had liked to listen to the exotic (to a Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical politics; to hear that Equality was a myth, and Multiculturalism was a fatuous dream; he thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies.

Public art claiming to represent our collective memory is just as often a work of historical erasure and political manipulation. It is just as often the violent inscription of myth over truth, a form of "over-writing"—one story overlaid and thus obscuring another—modeled in three dimensions