Quotes About Art

Malraux says art is our rebellion against man's fate. La condition humaine is what I have never accepted. That is why I tried to create my own world.

The important thing is to set the passion free. The drama is everything, the cause of the drama nothing.

Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm.

I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. For example now, I hate the bank and everything connected with it. I also hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am more preoccupied with loving.

One of my notes says: "Correct Anaïs' English." Do you want me to do that, or would Hugo consider that I am encroaching on his private domain?

The pages were all right—neither good nor bad, neither fish nor fowl. As I read them I seemed to hear the original lines from which they were abstracted, saw the wavering handwriting, and the curious childlike drawings, the mistakes, the bad spelling, the ink spots, the greasy finger-prints, the cheap paper (which is so touching in itself—the cheapest for genius always!). I rebelled

A creation is not a thing of the moment, instantaneously formed, but very slowly and gradually shaped out of infinitesimally small pieces. We think it is instantaneous because the process is more or less hidden and apparently mysterious. Here at last is the link between art and life which I have been seeking.

Don't tear anything up: it creates blanks, silences—like the dashes of [Paul] Valéry.

You are an "homme complet" That is why he is so intolerant of neurotic art and artists.

What you are trying to do is a piece of art that is perfect in itself as art and yet retains the imperfection, the human fragmented, chaotic characteristics of a diary written on the spot in white heat. I don't know whether it can be done. It's a problem.

I look around my room to see what I can offer you; I see only my silly water colors and notes—notes everywhere, and on the backs your name—show this to Anaïs, ask Anaïs, see Anaïs.

Life's problems were too limited, that it was a pity, that the function of the artist was to increase these problems, to cause upheavals in the brain, to make people wild and free so that there would be more drama to their lives.

You don't know what you are writing. You're like a painter who has gone blind to his work. Go out. Get on your bicycle. You need movement, rest.

I have holes in my shoes. I do not pay my bills. I try to finish House of Incest.

But that is poetry, I protest. Poetry is an abstraction.

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.

I write emotional algebra.

Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

Jeanne, I fell asleep among the paintings, where I could sit for many days worshipping your portrait. I fell in love with your portrait, Jeanne, because it will never change. I have such a fear of seeing you grow old, Jeanne, I fell in love with an unchanging you that will never be taken away from me. I was wishing you would die, so that no one could take you away from me, and I would love the painting of you as you would look eternally.

Let us tell them the painful truth, that most of these works of art are about God, whom we never mention in polite society.

Art is nothing tangible. We cannot call a painting 'art' as the words 'artifact' and 'artificial' imply. The thing made is a work of art made by art, but not itself art. The art remains in the artist and is the knowledge by which things are made.

Our hankering for a state of leisure or leisure state is the proof of the fact that most of us are working at a task to which we could never have been called by anyone but a salesman, certainly not by God or by our own natures. Traditional craftsmen whom I have known in the East cannot be dragged away from their work, and will work overtime to their own pecuniary loss. Why Exhibit Works of Art?

Art begins with resistance—at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.