Quotes About Art

I was the hero of the young insurgent working class art movement.

Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.

What is being lost is the magic of the word. I am not an image person. Imagery belongs to another civilization: the caveman. Caveman couldn't express himself so he put images on walls.

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

Well, that's just it, I thought: you didn't just write down a raw cry of suffering. It would be boring and self-indulgent. You had to disguise it, turn it into art. That's what literature was. That was what required talent, and made people want to read what you wrote, and then they would give you money.

Yes: understanding the point of sex felt just like understanding the point of Shakespeare. And weren't the two related?

I didn't identify with anyone in any paintings.

The closer art reflects reality, the less artistic it becomes. Art is most enticing when it mimics life as a wolf dressed in sheep's clothing. The contrary is always a grave disappointment.

To measure up takes skill, but to err is an art.

No artist is ever happy with all the work they produce, so why should their critics be? Let artists be revered for their best works of art—even if it happens but once in a lifetime—and forget about the rest. All too often art is a wondrous accident, and it is folly to seek genius in its maker.

It's not words, but years we should be editing. Remember: time spent on bad art is a form of redundancy, doing the same thing twice is a form of tautology, and wasting precious moments complaining about life is a form of pleonasm. We should all learn to live our lives concisely.

To associate art with the artist is to forfeit art, because at this moment we are pushed into the arena of self-expression, and can be recognized only by what differentiates us from others.

Writers are liars trying to come clean. That's why the best ones are the most tragic.

The awe-inspiring beauty of nature is nothing more than being flabbergasted by our ignorance of it. Good art produces the same effect; and the worst thing an artist can do is to follow the herd, because domesticated art is about as dynamic as a domesticated animal.

If an artist wants to be original, he should not look to art for inspiration, for art seeks its model in life, not art—and only life is rich enough to simulate originality.

Art is aesthetic communication of the soul—in fact, it's the best of that communication—and taken in its entirety has formed a body of work to stand alongside Science and Religion as one of the three great constructs of culture to aid the individual in his or her struggle to survive in Nature.

Creating a piece of writing is really the easiest thing in the world—about as natural as creating excrement (and many writers will, indeed, describe their work as such).

Everyone thinks alchemy is dead, but alchemists live among us—they are called editors: adept in the art of transformation, they practice arcane methods of selection, deletion and synthesis to take what is base and produce gold.

The key to writing is something to be stolen. How else does one open the door to a house of thieves?

When a scientist splits an atom, the event is locked away like a jewel in a castle, funneling down to the public through a myriad of institutions. But when an artist stumbles upon the key to unleashing universal evil, the forbidden fruit of his painstaking labor is packaged and sold at every corner store from Bangor to Bangkok. I'm still unsure whether this is the result of a lack of respect for artists (compared to scientists) or the moral corruption of artists (compared to scientists).

Adaptation for film is, by definition, a process of editorializing.

This is the real Ripley, the lover of beauty, inspired by art, by antiquity. He's awed. He's cold. He so much wishes he weren't alone.

Art is the one thing man creates not out of need or luxury; therefore, it is the purest essence of his individuality.

Hammer out the drawing. Unremitting, persistent effort will bend a stubborn ungainly sketch into a graceful finished drawing. We become tough, hardened drawing veterans.