Quotes About Art

The condition of the theater is always an accurate measure of the cultural health of a nation. A play always exists in the present tense (if it is a valuable one), and its music -- its special noise -- is always contemporary. The most valuable function of the theater as an art form is to tell us who we are, and the health of the theater is determined by how much of that we want to know.

A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it.

I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.

Lady, you can't fuck a metaphor.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. —Pablo Picasso

This mystery of use without consumption, of warmth without combustion, seems like magic, but was merely an ingenious application of the art now happily lost but carried to great perfection by your ancestors, of shifting the burden of one's support on the shoulders of others.

Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.

The artist tries to show reason in experience and appearance – and lyric is the daily appearance, the commonplace dress, of reason. It shows us the rational. It makes the epic pattern human. It's the footprint on the pathway. In the epic-lyric the individual and particular are no longer isolated but are placed in a historical, social, human pattern. That's why there's a political way of cutting bread or wearing shoes.

And now the initiation was begun. She was to read, to study, to depict by a gesture, a look, the passions she was to delineate on the boards; lessons dangerous, in truth, to some, but not to the pure enthusiasm that comes from art; for the mind that rightly conceives art is but a mirror which gives back what is cast on its surface faithfully only—while unsullied.

Discover what will destroy life, and you are a great man! — what will prolong it, and you are an imposter! Discover some invention in machinery that will make the rich more rich and the poor more poor, and they will build you a statue! Discover some mystery in art that will equalise physical disparities, and they will pull down their own houses to stone you!

I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be - in a light better than any light that ever shone - in a land no one can define, or remember, only desire.

You make a movie for 9k for the freedom it allows you.

The masks of her life would become the mythical body of her art.

I blame the pencil. I hadn't meant to do it. I wasn't thinking. It just happened that way.

You should trust any man in his own art provided he is skilled in it.

To write is a humiliation.

Bosch is great because what he imagines in color can be translated into justice.

The usual consolations of life, friendship and sex included, appealed to Newton hardly at all. Art, literature, and music had scarcely more allure. He dismissed the classical sculptures in the Earl of Pembroke's renowned collection as "stone dolls." He waved poetry aside as "a kind of ingenious nonsense." He rejected opera after a single encounter. "The first Act I heard with pleasure, the 2d stretch'd my patience, at the 3d I ran away.

Your necklace may break, the fau tree may burst, but my tattooing is indestructible. It is an everlasting gem that you will take into your grave.

Theatre is life. Cinema is art. Television is furniture.

Maintenance is as much art as it is science.

Scrapbooking fills my days - not to mention my living room, bedroom and closets!

I don't use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom.

Think before you ink!