Quotes About Art

Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.

You can't kill a minuet de la coeur. You may shut up the music book... but surely the minuet-- the minuet itself is dancing itself away into the furthest stars, even as our minuet of the Hessian bathing places must be stepping itself still.

You have no idea how engrossing such a profession may become. Just as the blacksmith says: 'By hammer and hand all Art doth stand,' just as the baker thinks that all the solar system revolves around his morning delivery of rolls, as the postmaster-general believes that he alone is the preserver of society - and surely, surely, these delusions are necessary to keep us going.

The exact eye: exact observation: it was a man's work. The only work for a man. Why then were artists soft: effeminate: not men at all: whilst the army officer, who had the inexact mind of the schoolteacher, was a manly man? Quite a manly man: until he became an old woman!

Sure, art doesn't save anybody the way a sack of rice does. But that doesn't mean it's worthless. There're plenty of ways of living in the world and among words and some of them are a fuck of a lot more predatory than others.

What some call superstructure, and what others call culture

She was all in pink, and a wreath of little pink wild roses lay close about her head, making her, with her tall young slimness, look like a Botticelli nymph.

Behind sunglasses we linger over espresso, talking about pizza as an art form, the geekiness of people's travel clothes...

He said he couldn't understand a world 'shameless and cruel enough to divide its people by color when color is in fact the sign of God's artistic genius.

As they clean the walls with wet cloths and sponges, they uncover the earlier paints, most prevalent a stark blue that must have been inspired by Mary's blue robes. Renaissance painters could get that rare color only from ground lapis lazuli brought from quarries in what is now Afghanistan.

Writing a poem doubles, triples the experience or connection that initiated it.

Under Magnolia is much more than an entrancing memoir: it is a work of art that defies the distinction between prose and poetry or novels and autobiographies. It is also much more than a personal narrative: it is an unflinching meditation on the relation between self and culture, and, more specifically, on the gravitational pull of memory. This is a book to be savored, a feast for both mind and soul.

She went out in the city with its lights like a radioactive phosphorescence, wandered through galleries where the high-priced art on the walls was the same as the graffiti scrawled outside by taggers who were arrested or killed for it, went to parties in hotel rooms where white-skinned, lingerie-clad rock stars had been staying the night their husbands shot themselves in the head, listened to music in nightclubs where stunning boyish actors had OD'd on the pavement.

Just like any woman,...we weave our stories out of our bodies. Some of us through our chicdren, or our art; some do it just by living. It's all the same.

My reading and studying and retellings of old stories didn't do anything except help me think better. I was at least thoughtful. Too thoughtful, my friends said. And all I thought about was myths and old paintings that made me feel drunk on wine or struck my lightning but didn't matter to most people.

What are you going to do if you find art, Pen? You going to steal some and put it in the van? I'm going to remember. When there was art.

When you look at pain as material it makes all the difference in the world. I thought, the pain that is too big to be eased by its use as material would be a pain I couldn't (and wouldn't want to) even imagine.

The only painting in the studio, besides the blue canvas, was the skeleton, mired in thickly smeared oils. I went and stood in front of it. I said, I wanted him to see me, Mister Bones. Bones grinned at me. Maybe Echo is not meant to be seen. She is meant to see.

There was a collage of dead butterflies on the wall.

It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be. And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees—this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward.

good writing should be grasped at once—in a second.

Literature not only breaks the rules, but makes us realize that there are none.

words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.

Every song may be someone's personal implement of torture.