Quotes About Art

Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.

Creativity is magic, don't examine it too closely.

People like theater that is safe, generally speaking — things that are easy, that are not too deeply troubling. In other words, people want to go to the theater and waste their time.

Actually I'd never planned a career in publishing, preferring the world of art.  There was always a sketch pad handy, though I soon learned that I was best with caricatures.  There was hardly a market for those unless one was a political cartoonist, an all-male world if there ever was one.  So it was publishing for me, at least for the time being.

He commanded a painter to reverse the figures and the attitudes; and the emperors were delineated on the same canvas, approaching in a suppliant posture to empty their bags of tributary gold

This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it's no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it's irritating.

All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important.... You can describe all the externals of a performance - everything, in fact, but what really constitutes its core. Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is what's left over after you've explained everything else.

Anyway, for whatever interest is to be derived therefrom. Bacon, Balthus, and Magritte are my three favourite painters, along with Dubuffet, of the whole post-impressionist period, by which I mean that before them Bonnard, Vuillard, & Seurat are my favourite painters of that time.

The Baron told her that only art meant anything.

I tend to think life is pastiche: I'm not sure what it's a pastiche of - we haven't found out yet.

New York was always materialist. But it was also the city of excellence, of art, music, of endless possibilities.

Personally I think that competition should be encouraged in war and sport and business, but that it makes no sense in the arts. If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefore all comparisons are incoherent.

In England, art was much less likely to be mentioned in polite society than sexual perversions or methods of torture.

He had only just made the Elysian deadline; hanging onto the typescript until the last moment in case there was something still to be done; two sentences turned into one, one sentence broken into two, the substitution of a slightly resistant adjective to engender a moment's reflection, in short, the joys of editing, all carried out without forgetting the art that disguises art.

If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefore all comparisons are incoherent. Only the mediocre, pushing forward a commonplace view of life in a commonplace language, can really be compared, but my wife thinks that least mediocre of the mediocre is a discouraging title for a prize[.]

He had become so caught up in building sentences that he had almost forgotten the barbaric days when thinking was like a splash of color landing on a page.

Life imitating bad literary criticism. Dis/inte/gration.

promising, like a silver flute lying on a page of music.

She made sadness beautiful

Our faith is a mishmash of many things. We believe in family, in music and art, but we mostly believe in each other -Giselle

This is why she wanted to make pictures, to have something to leave behind even after she was gone, something that showed what she had observed in a way that no one else had and no one else would after her.

I can't not put humor in a book.

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.