Quotes About Art

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

What directors, authors, comic artists, and even game designers want is to hit the audience with a cultural roundhouse. There's no way to do that effectively without pushing political buttons to overstimulate the most delicate nerve endings of personal belief, ideology, patriotism, gender roles, and unexamined hatreds.

The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.

Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

Concentration is the act of focusing one's attention. As the mind is allowed to focus on a single object, it stills. As the mind is kept in the present, it becomes calm. Concentration means keeping the mind now and here. Concentration is the supreme art because no art can be achieved without it, while with it, anything can be achieved.

I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined.

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a little. 1893. II

if one writes one can do nothing else.

A terrible beauty is born.

All art is, indeed, a monotony in external things for the sake of an interior variety, a sacrifice of gross effects to subtle effects, an asceticism of the imagination.

the Byzantine style, which so few care for to-day, but which moves me because these tall, emaciated angels and saints seem to have less relation to the world about us than to an abstract pattern of flowing lines that suggest an imagination absorbed in the contemplation of Eternity.

I spit upon the dancers painted by Degas. I spit upon their short bodies, their stiff stays, their toes whereupon they spin like peg-tops, above all upon that chambermaid face. They might have looked timeless, Remeses the Great, but not the chambermaid, that old maid history. I spit! I spit! I spit!

Yet surely there are men who have made their art Out of no tragic war, lovers of life, Impulsive men that look for happiness And sing when they have found it.

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a little.

What can be explained is not poetry.

Perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of current America is the attempt to reduce life to buying and selling. Life is not love unless love is sex and bought and sold. Life is not knowledge save knowledge of technique, of science for destruction. Life is not beauty except beauty for sale. Life is not art unless its price is high and it is sold for profit. All life is production for profit, and for what is profit but for buying and selling again?

But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its being and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.

Poetry makes nothing happen.