Quotes About Art

What if the creative act is not an act against God but a reflection of His image within us?

Art exists to remind us that we have a soul, and all we need to be an artist is a soul.

Though we may create many beautiful works of art, the most important works of art to which we will ever give ourselves are the lives we live.

reflects who we are. Our soul is the material for all we create.

All art is an expression and extension of ourselves.. Art finds its deepest value when it is the authentic expression of a deep human experience.

For our lives to be works of art, we need to allow a lifetime of work. We must give God the time to make us works of art. We must press close to God and allow both the tenderness of his touch and the pressure of his hands to shape us and mold us into someone we would not be without him.

finds its deepest value when it is the authentic expression of a deep human experience. Art becomes profound when it exposes us, explains us, or inspires us.

But when we reduce sex to a function, we also invoke the idea of dysfunction. We are no longer talking about the art of sex; rather, we are talking about the mechanics of sex. Science has replaced religion as the authority; and science is a more formidable arbiter. Medicine knows how to scare even those who scoff at religion. Compared with a diagnosis, what's a mere sin? We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.

As soon as we conform anything to language, we've changed it. Use a word and you've altered the world. The poets know this. It's what they try so hard to avoid.

the actual joy of acting lies in the absence of personality.

the theater is the living consciousness of the world.

There are only two kinds of Shakespeare productions; ones that change your life, and ones that suck shit. That's it. Because if it doesn't change the audience's life... the production has failed.

Not simply every number is tuneful, as in, say, The Boys From Syracuse. Not even every number exhilarates character, as in My Fair Lady. Rather: every number makes the experience so vivid that we are reminded that music theatre is our highest—our most complete—art.

Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader's illusion.

Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.

Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.

I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other

Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures, or strives to endure.

It's the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique--its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story's challenge and the work that rises to meet it--a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before.

Making reality real is art's responsibility.

The art that speaks [truth] most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.

Only the writing of fiction keeps fiction alive.

The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.