Quotes About Art

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

To him, all good things - trout as well as eternal salvation - came by grace; and grace comes by art; and art does not come easy

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Every one of my books had killed me a little more.

Obsesia premiilor semnific? o frustrare deloc stimulativ?. Crea?ia în art? fiind a solitudinii ?i originalit??ii, nu a onorurilor ?i reclamei...

I have tried to preserve in my relationship to the film the same closeness and intimacy that exists between a painter and his canvas.

Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn.

The opposite of war, the true war, is poetry

Art, by overcoming the inhibition and by activating the playful primary process, which is intrinsically easier and more enjoyable than the procedures of normal responsible thought, on both counts effects a saving in psychic expenditure and provides relief from the pressures of reason

Compare Nietzsche's doctrine of the necessary connection between suffering and art: "What must this people have suffered, that they might become thus beautiful." 6

The function of art—Freud says "wit"—is to help us find our way back to sources of pleasure that have been rendered inaccessible by the capitulation to the reality-principle which we call education or maturity—in other words, to regain the lost laughter of infancy

With the reference to the indispensable third person (an audience), Freud relates the demand for intelligibility to the demand for communication. The implication is that art has the function of making public the contents of the unconscious.

The View of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and the ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be.

I'll never have enough time to paint all the pictures I'd like to.

Each tile is curved and has an attractive rough texture. The colour varies from bright vermilion to dull Venetian red. They have the patina of almost two centuries of English sunshine and rain and are patterned with mosses in a wide range of emerald, apple and viridian greens. Any one of them, tastefully framed and hung in a London art gallery, would get rave notices from the critics.

I molded my body in clay on the potter's wheel. I carved my own heart out of carnelian and gave to my family my red, red love.

We then discover that we have no word, corresponding to "poem" in poetry or "play" in drama, to describe a work of literary art. It is all very well for Blake to say that to generalize is to be an idiot, but when we find ourselves in the cultural situation of savages who have words for ash and willow and no word for tree, we wonder if there is not such a thing as being too deficient in the capacity to generalize.

Drama is not a genre for infant prodigies: I can't think of a dramatist who made a major reputation as early as, say, Keats or Rimbaud in lyric poetry.

The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order.

The artist stands on the human being as a statue does on a pedestal.