Quotes About Art

Edward Tylor, a distinguished nineteenth-century cultural anthropologist. For him culture is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man [sic] as a member of society.

Is not art then a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more abstract it gets, the more transparent the air is. Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes? What a backwards contention it is to claim that life is more important than art! Life is good as long as it holds up to art: That in life which cannot be employed for art's sake is kitsch!

Er blätterte in den dicken, alten Alben mit Lichtbildern seiner Familie, [...], und je näher er den Anfängen dieser neuen Bildkunst zu blätterte, desto stolzer, kam ihm vor, hatten sich die Menschen ihr dargeboten.

Is not art then a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life?

The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that's the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.

the primary and only necessary way of experiencing a work of literary art is not by "understanding" it in analytical terms; it is by thrumming to the work of art.

If all the artists you loved changed you, they'd hack you up in little piece and you'd never get back together. That, or you'd end up loving only one artist forever.

fiction writers are the writer-directors of the cinema of inner consciousness

Art can elevate and ennoble. It can also degrade and even corrupt. Whatever should be done or not done by way of legal restriction of pornographic art, we ought not to make things easy on ourselves by pretending that art cannot be pornographic or that pornographic art cannot degrade. Nor ought we to avert our gaze from the peculiar insult and injustice involved in the government funding of pornography.

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

What care I if it be wild and improbable and lacking in literary art? I refuse to be any longer hampered by such canons of criticism. The one essential thing I demand of a book is that it should interest me. If it does, I forgive it every other fault.

Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.

If the bards of old the true has told The sirens have raven hair. But over the earth since art had birth, They paint the angels fair.

Never on painter's canvas lives The charm of his fancy's dream.

In the elder days of art Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part, For the gods see everywhere

The kind of juvenile story I like best to write -- and read, too, for the matter of that -- is a good, jolly one, art for art's sake, or rather fun for fun's sake, with no insidious moral hidden away in it like a pill in a spoonful of jam!

Prose, rightly written and read, is sometimes as beautiful as poetry.

There go more italics! But a few italics really do relieve your feelings.

The lines and verses are only the outward garments of the poem and are no more really it than your ruffles and flounces are YOU

I was just trying to write out some of my thoughts, as Professor Hamilton advised me, but I couldn't get them to please me. They seem so still and foolish directly they're written down on white paper and black ink. Fancies are like shadows... you can't cage them, they're such wayward, dancing things. But perhaps I'll learn the secret someday if I keep trying.

It's better to write about things you feel than about things you know about.

The sincere reaction to making meaningful art is often speechlessness. We make art about what we cannot understand through any other method. The finished product is like a pearl, complete and beautiful, but mute about itself. The writer has given us this piece of his interior and there is frequently no explanation, nothing to be said about it. Often, the writer himself has very little idea of what he has created.

See this page of paper? It's blank," Scull said. "That, sir, is the most frightening battlefield in the world: the blank page. I mean to fill this paper with decent sentences, sir—this page and hundreds like it. Let me tell you, Colonel, it's harder than fighting Lee. Why, it's harder than fighting Napoleon. It requires unremitting attention

Sanford Meisner taught actors never to look at the punctuation in a script. His belief was that it would force you into giving a particular line reading that might not be your own—meaning that you would get stuck in a certain way of saying it instead of following the impulses arising from your intention.