Quotes About Art

I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.

When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free.

Let's go over to Salvador Dali's suite at the St. Regis Hotel for a nightcap." This sounded like a surreal idea to me.

A poet that reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.

There is no need for you to formally promote certain doctrines: your very presence becomes a teaching example to others, a liberating art that opens their imagination to the potential freedom they also can experience. (p. 79)

At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect - a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.

Art does not deny that evil is real, but it places evil in a context that implies an affirmation; the structure of the picture, which is a metaphor for the structure of the Creation, suggests that evil is not final.

Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.

You're an artist, Mel. You can't expect to be a success at the same time.' She was warming her white hands. I was not sure that I was an artist, but it was nice to be told.

For much of art lies in the shifting aperture between the shadowy fore-image in the anticipating mind of the observer and the realized revelatory image in the work itself, and that is what we must learn to perceive more finely in the Bible.

I've about had it -- the agencies, the winking, the networks, the ratings. Anyone who thinks TV is an art medium is crazy -- it's an advertising medium.

Maybe there's a chance to get back to grown-up films. Anything that uses humor and dramatic values to deal with human emotions and gets down to what people are to people.

Real art is without irony. Irony distances the author from his material. Irony is a product of something. It's not the reason for doing something. Irony is a cheap shot.

Titanic I thought was the most dreadful piece of work I've ever seen in my entire life. Another film that I think is equally bad was American Beauty. So badly acted and directed. But people like that.

Art is an adventure. When it ceases to be an adventure, it ceases to be art. Not all of us pursue the inaccessible landscapes of the twelve-tone scale, just as not all of us strive for inaccessible mountain-tops, or glory in storms at sea. But the human incidence is there. Could it be that these two impractical pursuits — of beauty and of adventure's embrace — are simply two differing profiles of the same uniquely human reality?

But in the real, messy world of creativity, giving away the thing you don't really understand for the thing that you do is an inevitable tradeoff.

to make it climb, make it rhyme. Within

there's a telling answer to the question of what Albert Einstein claimed was so remarkable it could be labeled as both "the most beautiful thing we can experience" and "the source of all true science and art." His contention: the mysterious.

Anything too stupid to be spoken," he asserted, "is sung.

He that desireth to acquire any art or science seeketh first those means by which that art or science is obtained. If we ought to do so in things natural and earthly, how much more then in spiritual?

So the Eucharist -- in its sumptuous liturgical setting, surrounded by music, art, the word of God, and the prayer of the community -- does more than sustain the divine life in us. It delights us, as a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.

Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Sometimes, when I am reading, the way a person has phrased his truth is as important to me as the truth itself. The wording is like a powerful painting that I would like to put on the wall. I want to share the statement with other people, not just for its truth, but also because the way it is worded somehow has a special meaning for me.