Quotes About Art

Only lifeless mechanisms move along faultlessly straight lines and compass circles. In art the surest way to destroy is to canonize one given form and one philosophy: that which is canonized quickly dies of obesity, of entropy.

What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturbation ... whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.

In literary and art criticism there are two criteria, the political and the artistic.

In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.

Paris is a pen-and-ink drawing before nine o'clock.

Getting my poems published was a great achievement, but it didn't pay the rent. The only time I made any money was when I won a CAPS fellowship from the New York State Council on the Arts in 1983. They gathered sixteen poets in a room and handed us each a check for $5,000. The room was filled with happiness so thick you could cut it. Eventually, I started looking around for another way to make a living.

Painting has to do with knocking yourself out day after day trying to get what you want to down on canvas. Maybe it works and maybe it doesn't, but every day you try. That's what painting is.

The music I do is food... that will be your dinner.

A German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist "chaos" of the painting, asked Picasso: "Did you do this?" Picasso calmly replied: "No, you did this!"

The more opera is dead, the more it flourishes.

I find playwriting to be incredibly difficult compared to screenwriting. Part of it is that I grew up watching movies and not watching plays.

I don't have a lot of patience for boring arthouse movies.

I think movies have much more magic than the theater. Theater can be a magical experience, but movies thrust their subjectivity on you in a more profound way.

I find playwriting really painful. I love it, or I wouldn't do it, but I don't love the theater as much as I love movies.

Basically, there's not enough sex in movies, that's it. I'm trying to say it, people. I miss sex in movies because sex is natural, guns are not.

That's creativity in a nutshell. A messy tug-of-war with imagination to erase that feeling that nothing really matters anyway.

A good poem has rhyming but no ending; it continues to rhyme in our heart."

A writer travels through the heart again and again to express the beauty of its contents.

A writer tries to express those thoughts, which are inexpressible, with beauty and love.

An art is a poetry but only a few can read it.

Dancing is an expression of desire, thoughts, and emotion in a distinctive way.

Good poetry reveals the beauty of joy and tragedy.

Let your heart dance with pen and paper. Now fill the paper with dancing letters.

Poetry is the beauty of life.