Quotes About Art

Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.

The discovery of the art of reading is intimate, obscure, secret, almost impossible to explain, akin to falling in love.

as Stevenson so mournfully put it, that is the bitterness of art: you see a good effect, and some nonsense about sense continually intervenes.

The myth that the artist needs suffering to create tells the story the wrong way round... the song comes afterwards, not in the writhing of misery but in the recollection of that misery and the respite from it provided by the writing.

The discovery of the art of reading is intimate, obscure, secret, almost impossible to explain.

We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

It isn't only art that is incompatible with happiness, it's also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.

Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall.

Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.

Words are man's first and most grandiose invention. With language he created a whole new universe;

You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly—they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students—how to write piercingly.

You forget, I said, I'm a writer and the Muses are the daughters of Memory.

Because it is idiotic. Writing when there's nothing to say...

No podemos salir de nuestra irracionalidad fundamental por medio del razonamiento. Lo único que podemos hacer es aprender el arte de ser irracional en forma racional.

This is not drawing,' he cried, 'this is inspiration!' 'I had meant it to be drawing,' was Constable's characteristic answer.

Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.

But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too.

Because it is idiotic. Writing when there's nothing to say ... Precisely. But that requires the most enormous ingenuity. You're making flivvers out of the absolute minimum of steel-works of art out of practically nothing but pure sensation.

But, then, you were born a pagan; I am trying laboriously to make myself one. I can take nothing for granted, I can enjoy nothing as it comes along. Beauty, pleasure, art, women - I have to invent an excuse, a justification for everything that's delightful. Otherwise I can't enjoy it with an easy conscience.

It isn't only art that's incompatible with happiness; it's also science. Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.