Quotes About Art

An artist who is inspired is being obvious.

Life's truths cannot always be reduced to 12-point Times Roman.

Ce qui est utile à la littérature l'est souvent peu à la vie.

There is no place for grief in a house which serves the Muse.

At this moment, the story in his head was perfect. He also knew from experience that it would degenerate the second he started typing, because such was the nature of writing.

He only had the imperfect medium of words.

Aria: I went to Hollis. Because I was looking for...you know. Her. She was teaching an art class, so I ran inside, grabbed a paintbrush, and painted a scarlet A across her chest. You know, like that woman in The Scarlet Letter? It was awesome. She didn't know what hit her. And then I said, 'Now everyone will know what you've done'. Ella: Do you realize that Hester Prynne is supposed to be a sympathetic character?

Music is the great uniter. An incredible force. Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common.

Your mother won a special reward, she told me, because everyone had a head in her pictures. We all applauded.

And all that pink. It's like a giant vagina in there

I wanted to tell him so. Find the right words, string them together in the ideal way, knowing that here they would have the best chance of sounding perfect.

We sat there, not talking, for a few minutes. He ate the Moon Pie; only skinny people can scarf down junk food like that. Finally, I said, Norman? Yeah? Are you ever going to show me the painting? Man, he said. You are, like, so impatient. I am not, I said. I've been waiting forever. Okay, okay. He stood up and went over to the corner, picking up the painting and bringing it over to rest against the bright pink belly of one of the mannequins. Then, he handed me a bandana. Tie that on.

A wedding is a series of special moments, strung together like beads on a chain. Sure, by themselves, they are lovely, but put them all together and you get art.

And I'm going to pain the solar systems on the backs of her hands, so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, Oh, I know that like the back of my hand.

Do you think we make sad things into songs in order to hold on to the sadness or to banish it—I think it is to banish the sadness. So then if you write a happy song, is it not sadder than a sad song because by making it you have banished your own happiness into a song?

There is something aesthetically pleasing about trading one engraving - and old map - for another - American money.

Having studied art history, as opposed to political history, I tend to incorporate found objects into my books. Just as Pablo Picasso glued a fragment of furniture onto the canvas of Still Life with Chair Caning, I like to use whatever's lying around to paint pictures of the past--traditional pigment like archival documents but also the added texture of whatever bits and bobs I learn from looking out bus windows or chatting up people I bump into on the road.

French was assigned to sculpt allegorical figures of the continents. His America, from 1907, is one of the most concise depictions of our history I've ever seen: a European stepping on a Mayan head.

Tacking an object up on a wall changes things.

You go Picasso!

Art -- the fresh feeling, new harmony, the transforming magic which by means of myth brings back the scattered distracted soul from its modern chaos -- art, not politics, is the remedy.

Maybe America didn't need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the less we.

There's the most extraordinary, unheard of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it...the agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way.

Beauty is not a human invention.