Quotes About Art

I'm a synthesizer. We need to synthesize more the relationships between artists and scientists, and men and women.

To me, the original VCS3 synthesizer is like a Stradivarius.

Museums are custodians of epiphanies, and these epiphanies enter the central nervous system and deep recesses of the mind.

In a democracy, you need to have a strong judicial system. You need freedom of speech, you need art, and you need a free press.

I don't think it's a coincidence that comic books appeal so strongly to children. Not that it negates any of their power for adults, but there is something about comics that makes them a perfect storytelling system for children.

Let's talk of a system that transforms all the social organisms into a work of art, in which the entire process of work is included... something in which the principle of production and consumption takes on a form of quality. It's a Gigantic project.

Unlike art, the making of home does not stay done. Every morning, every evening, the mess awaits us. The messy, hungry, beautiful world, wanting and needing our touch.

If Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally," Eliot once wrote. "The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.

The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter, cut open a vein, and bleed.

I don't actually like explaining the meanings of my songs, because I think people can take away more from it if they use their imagination.

No matter what you're going through, as long as you have some specific emotion, whether it's positive or negative, it is all stuff that you can use on stage.

I was on the football team because I wanted to experience the different iconic social classes of high school. So football for me was an attempt to socially integrate in an interesting way. And then I didn't like it anymore and stopped doing it and focused more on drama and science and other forms of art and music.

For something to be beautiful it doesn't have to be pretty.

Mine is not an obedient writing. I think that literature as any art has to be irreverent.

A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architectural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.

Without atmosphere a painting is nothing.

Painting is the grandchild of Nature.

Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,--and even the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new meanings,--and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to too many half-lettered persons.

For indeed when painters themselves wish to represent sirens and satyrs [20] by means of especially bizarre forms, they surely cannot assign to them utterly new natures. Rather, they simply fuse together the members of various animals. Or if perhaps they concoct something so utterly novel that nothing like it has ever been seen before (and thus is something utterly fictitious and false), yet certainly at the very least the colors from which they fashion it ought to be true. And

regarding speculative matters that are of no practical moment, and followed by no consequences to himself, farther, perhaps, than that they foster his vanity the better the more remote they are from common sense; requiring, as they must in this case, the exercise of greater ingenuity and art to render them probable.

It's funny, I've decided 'Hallelujah' is a kind of Rorschach test for people, because everyone has a different reaction to it and to what I'm doing. I just sang it, and whatever came out was just natural and spontaneous and maybe that's the best thing, because there's a kind of enigma, both in the meaning of the words and the way Leonard Cohen said them, that catches people's attention.