Quotes About Art

I believe and find in my study of art that the real artist is nine-tenths of the time a craftsman, and it is only in that small one-tenth of the time that he rises to the elevated position of a prophet and a master.

Down with politics and the art of the possible; up with pronouncements and the allure of the prophetic: It's the way of demagogues everywhere.

True artists are prophets. I don't want to be that prophetic in that sense because it's so lonely.

The choice of films I make is directly proportional to the kind of cinema I have grew up watching.

I got into animals by drawing hair follicles. I liked drawing hair, and from that I got into feathers and fur, then into images of animals. The patterning is the same, but the proportions of the body change from one animal to the next. A lot of it is just geometry and consciousness.

A dress is a piece of ephemeral architecture, designed to enhance the proportions of the female body.

Georgia O'Keeffe proposed that I live with her. She was in New Mexico then, and I wanted to be in New York.

I don't follow any system. All the laws you can lay down are only so many props to be cast aside when the hour of creation arrives.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

Prose is admittedly an art rooted in social intercourse, and a fiction writer is faster to find a common denominator with his cell mates than a poet is.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.

The influence of cinema on all contemporary writers is undeniable. Because film is such a powerful and popular art form, we prose writers think cinematically.

If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.

In prose, you have a lot more room for digression, for very meaty kinds of dialogues. In graphic novels, you're writing haiku-length dialogue. Your job is to be efficient, to get out of the way of the art.

'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.

The poetic prose that most interests me is that of Henri Michaux.

I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.

Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.

Ideally, I'd like to write poetry for public performances and prose for a different, more contemplative kind of consumption.

I have a certain amount of creative energy, and it used to go painting. Now most of it goes to music. I like to make things. I treat the songs more like poems than prose, so in that sense, I don't really have a point to make. I just try to be surprised.

I think art is communication. To that extent, it can be the words between the words. It has a possibility of communicating something more than people can do with prose or just talking.