Quotes About Art

Fiction is a lie that tells deep truths

First draft, use your heart. Revision, use your head

The interaction between author and reader is the most intimate in the world of art. The reader's imagination shares and completes the writer's.

A good novel is like a fairy tale, a movie, a play, a jazz piece & a symphony resonating in the mind, each in its own way.

The purpose of art is subversion. Art is telling the world how it's killing you. How its institutions have failed you. In the end, any culture worth damn is made by subversives. Because art is what tells the world it needs to change. Power merely redecorates it.

Stop counting crayons, just draw pictures.

Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either.

One of the best things about paintings is their silence — which prompts reflection and random reverie.

If a man finishes a poem,he shall bathe in the blank wake of his passionand be kissed by white paper.

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.

Tell me, you people out there, what is poetry anyway? Can anyone die without even a little?

Photography is 90% sheer, brutal drudgery!

Who is this Renaissance? Where did he come from? Who gave him permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?

It is astonishing how few stories have been told perfectly.

It's funny, because music is one of those things it is natural to go into. You hear it so much growing up, it kind of permeates you and eventually you spew out some music of your own.

I like comedy but I guess I don't think [my art] is that funny, either. It's too dark and a bit weird in places to be genuinely, uniformly hilarious and function as comedy.

The only happy artist is a dead artist, because only then you can't change. After I die, I'll probably come back as a paintbrush.