Quotes About Art

Mighty is geometry joined with art resistless.

I'd never want my muse to be a singer of nothing but disaster.

Master of the bow-string's deadly music!

Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.

I took you out to dinner to warn you of charm. I warned you expressly and in great detail of the Flyte family. Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, Charles, it has killed you.' [Anthony Blanche to Charles Ryder]

You could appreciate the beauty of the world by trying to paint it.

I loved buildings that had grown silently with the centuries, catching the best of each generation while time curbed the artist's pride and the philistine's vulgarity and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman.

Creative Endeavour lost her wings, Mrs Ape.

Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance.

The problem of architecture as I see it is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human element from the consideration of the form.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition. Even the great Victorian artists were all anti-Victorian, despite the pressures to conform.

Why must you see everything secondhand? Why must this be a play? Why must my conscience be a pre-Raphelite picture?

Whenever I see anything lovely nowadays—a building or a piece of scenery—I think to myself, 'that's by Charles.' I see everything through his eyes. He is England to me." I heard her say that; it was the sort of thing she had the habit of saying. Throughout our married life, again and again, I had felt my bowels shrivel within me at the things she said.

Here, in one of the smaller oval frames, I sketched a romantic landscape, and in the days that followed filled it out in colour, and, by luck and the happy mood of the moment, made a success of it. The brush seemed somehow to do what was wanted of it. It was a landscape without figures, a summer scene of white cloud and blue distances, with an ivy-clad ruin in the foreground, rocks and a waterfall affording a rugged introduction to the receding parkland behind.

Amory smiled discreetly...'But beware the artist who's an intellectual also. The artist who doesn't fit--the Rousseau, the Tolstoi, the Samuel Butler, the Amory Blaine-

Say stupid shit. Barf out the fucking-around-o-maniacal schizo flow. Barter whatever for whoever wants to read it.

All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath.

Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.

Poetry is dying first. It'll be absorbed into prose sooner or later.

It's so hard to find a male to gratify one's artistic tastes.

Biography is the falsest of the arts.

it's so hard to find a male to gratify one's artistic taste

In fact to write (This Side of Paradise) took three months; to conceive it-- three minutes; to collect the data in it-- all my life.