Quotes About Art

The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.

Sometimes I don't know if Zelda isn't a character that I created myself.

Art isn't meaningless. - It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so. - In other words, Dick, you're playing before a grandstand peopled with ghosts. - Give a good show anyhow. - On the contrary, I'd feel, it being a meaningless world, why write? The very attempt to give it purpose is purposeless. Well, even admitting all that, be a decent pragmatist and grant a poor man the instinct to live. Would you want everyone to accept that sophistic rot?

Anthony for the moment wanted fiercely to paint her, to set her down now, as she was, as with each relentless second she could never be again. 'What were you thinking?' she asked. 'Just that I'm not a realist,' he said, and then: 'No, only the romanticist preserves the things worth preserving.

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

He was at once the commonest and the most remarkable product of civilization. He was nine out of ten people that one passes on a city street—and he was a hairless ape with two dozen tricks. He was the hero of a thousand romances of life and art—and he was a virtual moron, performing staidly yet absurdly a series of complicated and infinitely astounding epics over a span of threescore years.

As for the well-known Amory, he would write immortal literature if he were sure enough about anything to risk telling any one else about it.

Part of the enchantment of Paris in the Twenties was that everything that happened there seemed to have something to do with art.

She danced exceptionally well, drew cleverly but hastily, and had a startling facility with words, which she used only in love letters.

I've just finished a book of his, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray,' and I certainly wish you'd read it. You'd like

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

Talent doesn't starve any more. Even art gets enough to eat these days. Artists draw your magazine covers, write your advertisements, hash out rag-time for your theatres. By the great commercializing of printing you've found a harmless, polite occupation for every genius who might have carved his own niche. But beware the artist who's an intellectual also.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you - like music to the musician or Marxism to the communist - or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

No child ever receives a box of colored crayons and says, "What's the point? I can't draw." Nor does she reject a jar of modeling dough because sculpture is too complicated. If you give him a guitar, he gets sounds out of it without fuss. If you ask her to sing, she doesn't refuse to because she doesn't know the words or because she hasn't got a perfect voice: she simply takes a breath, opens her mouth and belts it out!

I brought a picture with me that I had at home, of a girl in a swing with a castle and pretty blue bubbles in the background, to hang in my room, but that nurse here said the girl was naked from the waist up and not appropriate. You know, I've had that picture for fifty years and I never knew she was naked. If you ask me, I don't think the old men they've got here can see well enough to notice that she's bare-breasted. But, this is a Methodist home, so she's in the closet with my gallstones.

stitches the needle was making, Kate Starr

El hacerse de reputación, pues, es arte que requiere tramoya y bambalinas.

O poeta é um fingidor. Finge tão completamente Que chega a fingir que é dor A dor que deveras sente.

I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can't be one in my body.

The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.

Autopsychography The poet is a man who feigns And feigns so thoroughly, at last He manages to feign as pain The pain he really feels, And those who read what once he wrote Feel clearly, in the pain they read, Neither of the pains he felt, Only a pain they cannot sense. And thus, around its jolting track There runs, to keep our reason busy, The circling clockwork train of ours That men agree to call a heart.

A Arte é, com efeito, o aperfeiçoamento subjectivo da vida.

La literatura, como cualquier forma de arte, es la confesión de que la vida no basta.

To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarate, and the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning it into a slumber. The other arts make no such retreat – some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.