Quotes About Art

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.

Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.

Civic participation depends on creativity, an (aesthetic) knack for reframing experience, and on a corollary freedom to adjust laws and practices in light of ever-new challenges. Without art, citizenship would shrink to compliance, as if society were a closed text. Reading lessons would stop at the factual "what is," rather than continue to the speculative "what if.

Leadership, Boal concluded, is the art of facilitating imaginative interventions by the greatest possible number...

Write to your fear.

A novel is more a symphony, opera, oratorio. It exists in time, it goes by you a sound dying out as you write on, so that it is very hard to keep in touch with the whole thing...

MTV is the lava lamp of the 1980's.

There is an art to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

There is an art to flying ... or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

There is an art, or rather a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

The Guide says there is an art to flying", said Ford, "or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

Cronkite had mastered the intentional pause, the need for frozen seconds of long silence at certain historic moments. Nobody before or after Cronkite had mastered the art of communicating news on television nightly without ever becoming an irritant.

He had read a description of the life of a novelist, and decided his life wasn't too far different. Writing is easy, Gene Fowler had famously observed. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

A person who believes in a particular conceptual system believes that everything can be explained by reference to that conceptual system. Whereas the artist sees the pattern and feels the mystery that looms beyond the pattern. […] Great art is pattern over mystery, it is juggling words over whirlpools of silence.

The only possible demand at the endpoint of deconstruction is to deconstruct some more. And it seems possible to pull apart and find cause for resentment endlessly. Certainly, that is the hope of the deconstructionists, who now scour the world of art and look for symbols of rape, male dominance, privilege, racism, and much more.10 And of course they find things to occupy their time.

Books,' he said, like he might have said 'Jewels.

In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.

Modeling the world mathematically is as uniquely a human trait as language or art, but you would rarely find anyone complaining of being "reduced to a poem" or "reduced to a painting.

Writing well is more than mechanics, but it is not less.

One of the staples of discussion about basic aesthetic principles is that art has to exist for its own self and cannot be prostituted to advance any particular cause or point of view. Perfect nonsense, of course, but that doesn't keep it from being repeated ad nauseam.

It is not whether certain values will be propagated by art, but rather which values will be propagated.

When the travesties scattered throughout our modern art museums are set alongside the glories of ancient Greece, the Christian heart should swell with pride.

Immodest and attractive is easy. Modest and repulsive is easy too. But modest and attractive is an art form.