Quotes About Art

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give values to survival.

A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting-Marcel Duchamp

Art should grasp the mind the way the vagina grasps the penis-Marcel Duchamp

I don't want to be pinned down to any position. My position is the lack of a position, but of course you can't even talk about it; the minute you talk you spoil the whole game-Marcel Duchamp

The landscape of Hell is the largest shared construction project in imaginative history, and its chief architects have been creative giants- Homer, Virgil, Plato, Augustine, Dante, Bosch, Michelangelo, Milton, Goethe, Blake, and more.

Who do you serve? Do you serve somebody? I serve the poem, no one.

We are our songs and films.

Writing a poem, I construct a magenta fan with a photolikeness, enclosed in a central oval, of a beloved relation, with her hair brown that is not to say, before her hair turned grey: it's her essential self. Someone's jealous of the attention I'm paying her in my work because he wants it all for his art which is a pure, gridded, layer of words painted in crosshatched grey monochrome brushstrokes. Your art, he seems to say to me, kisses life's ass. His art asks that his own ass be kissed.

It isn't a good price, that you pay for writing a poem.

I don't want this poem to be beautiful. I do.

The paintings seemed to bear the same relation to reality as prayers to the vision of God.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Art is supposed to make you feel something, and I began to realize my appearance was my art. My body, my face, my scars told a story—my story. But I guess that's how life works sometimes—noticing beauty only in retrospect and poetry, in silence.

The magic in any art is not only in its technique but in its authenticity. Truth in its rawest form is what resonates most powerfully.

Design is intelligence made visible.

Dying is also an art and just like any other art it must be learned.

My art, my greatest art, is the skill to live within me.

My father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta. But the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset - from salmon to canary to midnight blue - left him wordless.

Girls were meant to paint screens, sob out ballads, and play the pianoforte, not see through the masks of polite society. "It

If the spirit of a place has anything to do with what a poet makes, then it must be the intensity of light (two f-stops brighter than New York) and the extreme geography that so infuse the mind in Provincetown and make one more reflective. With all that jazzed-up light, the excitement of photons bounding off water and sand, even the ordinary air says, Notice me. … the function of art is to wake us up to the very life we are living.

No entiendo por qué te empeñas en seguir escribiendo —me dijo una vez que estaba especialmente deprimida —. Da la impresión de que hacerlo te causa un enorme malestar.

It is a mistake to confuse old with golden, a word within which those letters are often trapped. But the old Hollywood studios did have a golden era, when art, and commerce, and hard work fitted comfortably together.

Prose is sending poets to prison. Poetry is the poet in prison secretly composing poems by heart, going right on with the truth.