Quotes About Art

You feel that if only you could make yourself sit down at a typewriter you could give shape to what seems merely a chain reaction of pointless disasters.

Poetry is a language adequate to one's experience.

Don't make the mistake of believing it's enough to reproduce the realities of life.... The object of art is to give life a shape, and to do it by every conceivable artifice.

Inspiration is a trick that poets have invented to give themselves importance.

Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some.

Talent is like a faucet; while it is open, you have to write. Inspiration? - a hoax fabricated by poets for their self-importance.

I like nature but not its substitutes. Naturalist art, illusionism, is a substitute for nature. I remember that in arguing with Mondrian (in Paris 1920s, ed.), he opposed art to nature saying that art is artificial and nature is natural. I do not share this opinion. I do not think that nature is in natural opposition to art. Arts origins are natural.

We do not wish to copy nature. We do not want to reproduce, we want to produce. We want to produce as a plant produces a fruit and does not itself reproduce. We want to produce directly and without meditation. As there is not the least trace of abstraction in this art, we will call it concrete art.

A painting or sculpture not modelled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone... (but) it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses... (art must be like, ed.) fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant or a child in its mothers womb.

Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable order.

We painted embroidered and made collages. All these works were drawn from the simplest forms and were probably the first examples of concrete art. These works are realities pure and independent with no meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected all mimesis and description, giving free reign to the elementary and spontaneous.

So-called "realist" photography does not capture the "what is." Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.

Style can make complicated things seem simple, or simple things complicated.

Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

The matters I relateAre true lies.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Art is science made clear.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

An artist cannot speak about his art anymore than a plant can discuss horticulture.

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

There must be a wound inside the words that communicates.

There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.