Quotes About Art

Virgil had read once that Grandma Moses was a primitive painter because she thought snow was white. The writer said if you really looked at it, snow was hardly ever white. It mostly was a gentler version of the color of the sky - blue, gray, orange in the evenings and mornings, often with purple shadows. When he looked, sure enough, the guy was right, and Grandma Moses had her head up her ass.

Humans are also social creatures. Even the introverts among them crave interaction—not necessarily with other humans, but rather with the residue and output of those other humans: books and music and art, to be contemplated and perhaps even created.

The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive.

I nearly always write just as I nearly always breathe.

Henri the painter was not French and his name was not Henri. Also he was not really a painter. Henri has so steeped himself in stories of the Left Bank in Paris that he lived there although he had never been there.

He wanted to say something beautiful, I think.

And finally comes culture, which is entertainment, relaxation, transport out of the pain of living.

A writer of stories is a liar.

The pictures were designed to soothe without arousing interest – engravings of cows in ponds, deer in streams, dogs in lakes. Wet animals seem to serve some human need.

Critics are the eunuchs of literature. They stand by in envious awe while the whole man and his partner demonstrate the art of living.

To finish is a sadness to a writer- a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.

The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.

Poetry was a secret vice, and properly so.

There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything.

is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

I try to write what seems to me true. If it isn't true for other people, then it isn't good art. But I've only my own eyes to see with. I won't use the eyes of other people.

Joad carefully drew the torso of a woman in the dirt, breasts, hips, pelvis. "I wasn't never a preacher," he said. "I never let nothin' go by when I could catch it. An' I never had no idears about it except that I was goddamn glad when I got one.

Whatever men make, she says, what they felt when they made it is there...Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.

I glance around at the nest we have made, at the floorboards polished by our bare feet, at the continents of stain on the ceiling like an old and all-wrong discoverer's map, at the earnestly bloated canvases I conscientiously cover with great streaks straining to say what even I am begining to suspect is the unsayable thing, and I grow frightened.

What's beauty if it's not, in the end, true? Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.

The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.

The beast is dry and mottled, shedding skin as minutes drop from life, a wristy piece of dogged ugliness, its labors meant to carve from language beauty, that beauty which lifts free of flesh to find itself in print

My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.

Being a great writer is not the same as writing great.