Quotes About Art

Es una simple cuestión de estética. Eso es lo que se pretende: la belleza. No se trata de transmitir ideas. Eso era antes. Ahora se persigue... —El poeta agitó las manos en el aire—. La hermosura..., incluso en la muerte. Lo único que tiene importancia es eso: el arte. El arte por el arte. No existe institución, ni territorio, ni autoridad ni sentimiento que venga a imponernos una sola letra.

Honestly, Bob: how do you carve a scream?

I doubted I would need my eyes. I drew in the dark, after all.

She'd drawn the moment of her death. No. NO. She'd DRAWN herself to death.

Modigliani liked Baudelaire's poem about the albatross being mocked by sailors: 'Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!')

Life seemed too calm; people looked for unhappiness in art as one might look for a raw material in short supply.

I love art more than virtue, more than people, more than people, more than family, more than friends, more than any kind of happiness or joy in life. I love it secretly, jealously, like an old drunkard - incurably.

I photograph anything that light falls on.

líneas de Tolstói, o hayas escuchado una de las grandes piezas musicales, o hayas visto un cuadro o al menos su reproducción. No olvides el sueño que ha renacido.

I believe in writing — nothing else; just writing. Man may live like a worm, but he writes like a god. There was a time when that secret was known, but now it has been forgotten; the world is composed of disintegrating fragments, an incoherent dark chaos, sustained by writing alone.

Images are meanings in the art of Gerald Murnane, who says bluntly (in Words and Silk ): 'The only things that really interest me are images'.

Man may have rank and position and a thousand qualifications, he may possess all the good of the earth, but if he lacks the art of personality he is poor indeed. It is in this art that man shows the nobility which belongs to the kingdom of God.

We needed no Shakespeare to feel -- though, perhaps, like the rest of the world, we needed him to express it.

Ausdruck ist Wahn

What actually is possible, however, is transformation. And the transformative effect that emanates from new works leads us to new perception, to a new feeling, new consciousness

It doesn't matter if anyone else ever sees my pictures or not. They are for me, part of who I am and how I express my interpretation of what I see in this world.

The Seventh Seal is one of the few films really close to my heart. Actually, I don't know why. It's certainly far from perfect. I had to contend with all sorts of madness, and one can detect here and there the speed with which it was made. But I find it even, strong, and vital.

I don't want to produce a work of art that the public can sit and suck aesthetically. I want to give them a blow in the small of the back, to scorch their indifference, to startle them out of their complacency.

Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.

When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings. Music works in the same fashion; I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence.

The film medium is some sort of magic. I think also it's a magic that every frame comes and stands still for a fraction of a second and then it darkens. A half part of the time when you see a picture you sit in complete darkness. Isn't that fascinating? That is magic.

My play opens with an actor walking down into the audience, where he strangles the critic, then reads aloud from a little black book all the humiliations he has noted therein. Then he throws up on the audience, after which he exits and puts a bullet through his head.

Man has made himself free, terribly and dizzyingly free. Religion and art are kept alive for the sake of sentimentality, as a conventional politeness toward the past, a benevolent solicitude of leisure's increasingly nervous citizens.

No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.