Quotes About Art

The good thing about films is, you never know how good they will be. If there was a formula, there would only be good films!

The good thing about Indian dance is that it relies a lot on communication. There is nothing that can't be communicated by Bharatanatyam.

I really wanted to go to a city and get involved in a theater scene and a theater community. I had some friends who had moved out to Chicago and had said really good things about it and about the work. I didn't care at that time about making money.

I think about the very truth that changed my life. I want to put good things in my music.

The 1990s felt like the 1990s in a real and good way.

I think that anything that leads to creativity and good work is good.

I'm such a coward that unless I get a good writer, I don't want to make a picture.

Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.

There is no such thing as happy music.

My compositions spring from my sorrows. Those that give the world the greatest delight were born of my deepest griefs.

No one understands another's grief, no one understands another's joy. . . . My music is the product of my talent and my misery. And that which I have written in my greatest distress is what the world seems to like best.

Poem in other words may or may not result from inspiration but must (in reader and author alike) produce it--

Writing—the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye," which, he had no doubt, "is the great invention of the world.

Operagoing at its best is about the rekindling of the soul, about having an open window into what makes us human.

I believe that what Genesis suggests is that this original self, with the print of God's thumb still upon it, is the most essential part of who we are and is buried deep in all of us as a source of wisdom and strength and healing which we can draw upon or, with our terrible freedom, not draw upon as we choose. I think that among other things all real art comes from that deepest self - painting, writing music, dance, all of it that in some way nourishes the spirit.

So, art is saying Stop. It helps us to stop by putting a frame around something and makes us see it in a way we would never have seen it under the normal circumstances of living, as so many of us do, on sort of automatic pilot, going through the world without really seeing much of anything.

So generally—and this is not a complicated point, God knows—the arts frame our life for us so that we will experience it. Pay attention to it.

Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.

Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other.

I don't paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.

I paint flowers so they will not die.

I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.