Quotes About Art

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.

For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art.

I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.

I build a kind of wall between myself and t he model so that I can paint in peace behind it. Otherwise, she might say something that confuses and distracts me.

My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different from others. My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings.

The camera will never compete with the brush and palette until such time as photography can be taken to Heaven or Hell.

No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.

No creo en el arte que no nace de la necesidad del hombre de abrir su corazón.

Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.

Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.

All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.

Great art is never perfect; perfect art is never great.

What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.

Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose of my art. The other half must be to tell my story in the most honest way that I can.

How become a writer? Naturally.

A part of our nature rebels against this truth and against that other part which would accept it. A second truth of equal weight contradicts the first, proclaiming through art, religion, philosophy, science and even war that human life, in some way not easily definable, is significant and unique and supreme beyond all the limits of reason and nature. And this second truth we can deny only at the cost of denying our humanity.

One no longer searches for any ulterior significance in all this; as in the finest music, the meaning is in the music itself, not in anything beyond it. All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.

There was this tendency to drift. And yet  when she thought about it, what did she really want to do? Or be? She had given up dancing-the dance-because it was too demanding, because it required an almost total devotion which she was unwilling to give. The cruelest art. 

I'm not responsible for the commercialization. The people who produce the plays are responsible for it.

In a democracy you cannot stop public access to that art that will most misinform the people. You cannot stop people from being misinformed. But what you can do is to educate the people to the point that they will throw the rascals out.

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

When I'm writing a play I hear it like music. I use the same indications that a composer does for duration. There's a difference, I tell my students, between a semi-colon and a period. A difference in duration. And we have all these wonderful things, we use commas and underlining and all the wonderful punctuation things we can use in the same way a composer uses them in music. And we can indicate, as specifically as a composer, the way we want our piece to sound.

The function of art is to bring people into greater touch with reality, and yet our movie houses and family rooms are jammed with people after as much reality-removal as they can get.

I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.