Quotes About Art

Dali's Reclining Woman Wearing a Chemise looks like a dead slaughtered doll, and I can see preying eagles, broken arrows, and jazz musicians in Jackson Pollock, and because I believe that Man Ray and Duchamp were lovers.

I think it [religion] is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communion all the other arts attempt.

Sacrifice is the secret — you have to sacrifice things for art and it's the same with religion; and then the sacrifice turns out to be a gain." Then I got confused and I couldn't hold on to what I meant — until Miss Blossom remarked: "Nonsense, duckie — it's perfectly simple. You lose yourself in something beyond yourself and it's a lovely rest.

He can be so appreciative of all forms of art, but so matter-of-fact and unemotional about it.

In addition, I think religion has a chance of a look-in whenever the mind craves solace in music or poetry-- in any form of art at all. Personally, I think it is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communication all the other arts attempt.

The pictures are postcard reproductions of Old Masters. She has lots of metal animals about an inch long, little wooden shoes, painted boxes only big enough to hold stamps.

Because there's so much that just can't be said plainly. Try describing what beauty is - plainly - and you'll see what I mean.

Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.

Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.

I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.

why something and not nothing? why music and not noise?

Writing is freedom.

I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself.

Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.

Whatever you set your mind to, your personal total obsession, this is what kills you. Poetry kills you if you're a poet, and so on. People choose their death whether they know it or not.

Television. Maybe it was all a study in the art of mummification. The effect of the medium is so evanescent that those who work in its time apparatus feel the need to preserve themselves, delivering their bodies to be lacquered and trussed, sprayed with the rarest of pressurized jellies, all to one end, a release from the perilous context of time. This is their only vanity, to expect to dwell forever in hermetic sub-corridors, free of every ravage, secure as old kings asleep in sodium.

Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not. [...] To plot, to take aim at something, to shape time and space. This is how we advance the art of human consciousness. (WN 291-2)

What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous.' 'And the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art.

A band played live Muzak.

People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.

Whatever you set your mind to, your personal total obsession, this is what kills you. Poetry kills you if you're a poet, and so on. People choose their death whether they know it or not.

Do we have to believe something happened exactly the way it was shown by artists?

It is just so interesting, he says at last. The colors and all. The colors and all.