Quotes About Art

Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I'm sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here—and, by extension, what we're supposed to be writing.

Writing Down the Bones

So I'd start writing without reining myself in. It was almost just typing, just making my fingers move. And the writing would be terrible.

There's no way to tell until you've got it all down, and then there might just be one sentence or one character or one theme that you end up using. But you get it all down. You just write. I heard Natalie Goldberg, the author of Writing Down the Bones, speak on writing once. Someone asked her for the best possible writing advice she had to offer, and she held up a yellow legal pad, pretended her fingers held a pen, and scribbled away.

Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can't—and, in fact, you're not supposed to—know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing.

Perhaps we painted on our own skin, with ochre and charcoal, long before we painted on stone.

We made our paints from the bones of the animals we painted. No image forgets this origin.

When I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.

I believe that true identity is found . . . in creative activity springing from within. It is found, paradoxically, when one loses oneself. Woman can best refind herself in some kind of creative activity of her own.

You could make beautiful pictures with paint, but there was nothing behind it.

el arte en mayúscula se distingue por una universalidad, una pasión que habla a toda clase de personas, combinadas con algo exclusivo del artista que lo torna totalmente personal, la sensibilidad de un hombre, una mirada individual. Se

In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art--the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard's canvases--beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.

But during all these years I had a vague but persistent desire to return to New Orleans. I never forgot New Orleans. And when we were in tropical places and places of those flowers and trees that grow in Louisiana, I would think of it acutely and I would feel for my home the only glimmer of desire I felt for anything outside my endless pursuit of art.

Who cares? Kingdoms rise and fall. Just don't burn the paintings in the Louvre, that's all.

I had wanted to say that my song was far too painful to sing.

I picture heaven as a vast library, with unlimited volumes to read. And paintings and statues to examine galore. I picture it as a great doorway to learning...rather than one great dull answer to all our questions

I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.

You never know the palette of the one you kill until the mind disgorges its finest colours.

But you're dead inside to me, you're cold and beyond my reach! It is as if I'm not here, beside you. And, not being here with you, I have the dreadful feeling that I don't exist at all. And you are as cold and distant from me as those strange modern paintings of lines and hard forms that I cannot love or comprehend, as alien as those hard mechanical sculptures of this age which have no human form. I shudder when I'm near you. I look into your eyes and my reflection isn't there . . . .

If I'm an angel, paint me with black wings.

You painted armless beings, swimming in blinding color, and they had to exist like that forever. Could they see you with all those tiny, scattered eyes? Or did they only see the heaven and hell of their own shining realm, anchored to the studs in the wall by a piece of twisted wire?

from the classically executed lifelike bouquets, tempting you to reach for the petals that fell on a three-dimensional tablecloth, to a new and disturbing style in which the colors seemed to blaze with such intensity they destroyed the old lines, the old solidity, to make a vision like those states which I'm nearest my delirium and flowers grow before my eyes and crackle like the flames of lamps.

I admitted I was afraid of the very idea, as afraid as a mortal might have been of designing offspring genetically to enter certain branches of the arts or certain professions.

You make life when you play," I said. "You create something from nothing. You make something good happen.