Quotes About Art

A villain let your creativity out of its cage.

This was why there was music, he realized. There were some feelings that just didn't have words big enough to describe them.

She had given me my first crayons and coloring book, and had held me when I messed up, assuring me that the lines were for people with no imagination

the smile of a child is a tattoo: indelible art.

Everyone has a book inside them - but it doesn't do an good until you pry it out.

If you end your story, it's a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don't, it belongs to anyone's imagination. It stays alive forever

Now, I was starting to see that what looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.

different readers. What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet?

This is true of anyone: the music we choose is a clear reflection of who we really are.

It's because you don't just tell stories," Darija explained. "You paint with words.

oriental marionette imitating an occidental gesture.

A man who has attained mastery of an art reveals it in his every action.

People sometimes complain that Berliners just sit around all day in cafes, smoking and talking about art. Is that supposed to be a bad thing?

As a boy, all I ever wanted was this: a life dedicated to art; every idea, every breath an artistic gesture. And here is this girl before me, blowing on her hands to keep warm. And why am I so worried it's not going to last?

He wants to say: First of all, you were wrong about pop music. And art and all of pop culture. And all kinds of things. Because all of it matters. Even if it is awful. Everybody knows all the bad movies and the bad songs on the radio. Because it's the only thing anybody has in common anymore. It's all anybody has. So you were wrong about that and you were wrong about us and you were wrong about me, but he doesn't actually say any of this out loud.

Everyone looks like they've just stepped out of a Dante Gabriel Rossetti painting that he never got around to finishing because even he knew it was too over the top. It

Poetry is like a beef bouillon cube; it's hardly ever needed (or perhaps never needed at all); it sits in its precious wrapper, well out of view, until everyone has forgotten it's there.

But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed? How has it happened that all the fine arts, architecture, painting, sculpture, statuary, music, poetry, and oratory, have been prostituted, from the creation of the world, to the sordid and detestable purposes of superstition and fraud? [ Letter to judge F.A. Van der Kamp, December 27, 1816 .]

In general, the modern assumption is that we are sleepwalking to disaster and need to be roused from our complacency by angry, disturbing voices that tell us how bad things really are. Goethe's assumption is that - as individuals - we are, at least quite often, not complacent but the opposite: hysterical. Therefore a significant task for art and culture might be to calm us down, to bring order and harmony - so that we can do what we need to do.

Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing.

It seems to me a work of art is the evidence offered by a fantastically observant witness

Oh, by the way, the plot: it almost slipped my mind. Charlie French bought my mother's pictures cheap and sold them dear to Binkie Behrens, then bought them cheap from Binkie and sold them on to Max Molyneaux. Something like that. Does it matter? Dark deeds, dark deeds. Enough.

So, reader, should you ever find yourself writing about the world, take care not to nibble at the many tempting symbols she sets squarely in your path, or you'll be baited into saying things you don't really mean, and offending the people you want most to entertain. Develop, if you can, the technique of the pall bearers and myself: smile, to be sure -- for fucking dogs are truly funny -- but walk on and say nothing, as though you hadn't noticed.

My feeling about technique in art is that it has about the same value as technique in lovemaking. That is to say, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill; but what you want is passionate virtuosity.