Quotes About Art

I should mention that I am a brilliant deflector. So brilliant that I could get a full scholarship to college and major in it, except why bother? I've already mastered the art.

On my bed, I sit down and flip through the cut-up books one by one, reading all the cut-up passages.

Writing is so difficult that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.' 

Sometimes you got to just feel, especially when it comes to music. Notes, scales, they just get in the way.

Your identifier is you. I remember your eyes. Your mouth. The freckles on both cheeks that look like constellations. I know your smiles, at least three of them, and at least eight of your expressions, including the ones you only do with your eyes. If I could draw, I would draw you, and I wouldn't need to look at you to do it. Because your face is stuck in my mind.

Written on the wall behind them was: 'Blues for the body, food for the soul.

Poetry must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock.

Even Émile Zola was reduced to disingenuously commenting on the work's formal qualities rather than acknowledging the subject matter. He paid tribute to Manet's honesty, however, "When our artists give us Venuses, they correct nature, they lie. Édouard Manet asked himself why lie, why not tell the truth; he introduced us to Olympia, this fille of our time, whom you meet on the sidewalks.

a boundless contempt for everything outside their art, for society, and above all, for politics. (64)

large, color-stained fingers (23)

he was carried aloft, for the moment, on one of those great waves of hope from which he was usually plunged deep into the agonies familiar to all artists with a devouring passion for nature. (25)

that they were often as thrilled by trash as by an acknowledged masterpiece (32)

I want to depict the artist's struggle with reality, the sheer effort of creation which goes into every work of art, the blood and tears involved in giving of one's flesh, in trying to make something that lives...the endless the defeats, the struggle with the angel.' (ix)

What was Art, after all, if not simply giving out what you have inside you? ... Wasn't a bunch of carrots, yes, a bunch of carrots, studied directly and painted simply, personally, as you see it yourself, as good as any of the run-of-the-mill, made-to-measure Ecole des Beaux-Arts stuff, painted with tobacco juice? The day was not far off when one solitary, original carrot might be pregnant with revolution! (35)

it was in that uncertain state of mind that he began to sketch her face (12)

The subjects had, indeed, risen vividly on my mind. As I saw them with the spiritual eye, before I attempted to embody them, they were striking; but my hand would not second my fancy, and in each case it had wrought out but a pale portrait of the thing I had conceived.

Now here is the babyish trash.

I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.

Who of us knows just why we do what we do, much less another's whys, or what we're after? Art is not like that; cut and dried and hit-at like a bull's eye and done for a reason and explained away by this or that motive. It's climbing and striving for something always beyond.

Professor, you are very hard on that young Canadian girl! Hard? The Professor shrugged, spread his palms. Art - the girl has 'makings.' It takes red-hot fury to dig 'em up. If I'm harsh it's for her own good. More often than not worth while things hurt. Art's worth while.

Nature is what we know / Yet have not art to say / So impotent our wisdom is / To her simplicity.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Her Grace is all she has - And that, so least displays - One Art to recognize, must be, Another Art, to praise.

The Martyr Poets The Martyr Poets — did not tell — But wrought their Pang in syllable — That when their mortal name be numb — Their mortal fate — encourage Some — The Martyr Painters — never spoke — Bequeathing — rather — to their Work That when their conscious fingers cease — Some seek in Art — the Art of Peace —