Quotes About Art

I'll write about my past but I won't talk about it. I'll turn it into art if I can, but I won't talk about it.

Pure evil has no real place. And that means, doesn't it, that I have no place. Except, perhaps, in the art that repudiates evil—the vampire comics, the horror novels, the old gothic tales—or in the roaring chants of the rock stars who dramatize the battles against evil that each mortal fights within himself.

Poetry is truth... It is the highest truth, and eloquence is its attribute.

boy—before intense anxiety had crushed his chances for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and sent him into the awful mental decline in which he'd been made a vampire.

Mis recuerdos son demasiado claros, demasiado agudos; las cosas debieran gastarse en los bordes y lo irresoluto debería suavizarse. De ese modo, hay escenas tan cerca de mi corazón como fotos en un marco; sin embargo, son retratos monstruosos que ningún artista ni ninguna cámara jamás lograrán.

I wrestled as well with my passion for life, my lust for pleasure, for music, and beauty, and comfort and sensuality, and the inexplicable joys of art—and the baffling majesty of loving another so much that all the world, it seemed, depended on that love.

There had never been any talent, any talent to draw or paint or to make music or to write or to make any of the wonderful and beautiful things he'd loved. There was only the keen eye to appreciate it, the heartbreaking capacity to perceive talent in others all around...only a gentleman's means could have kept him close to the talent of others, kept him close to all that was fine and enduring and filled life with daily grace.

Beethoven's Ninth. I played the torture part. I played the Second Movement.

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. Do you think the hereafter could be like that?

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.

It is perhaps worth remembering that we are all, as a species, prey to dreams and nightmares. Our art is built upon the irrepressible stream of images rising from a secret fulcrum that can never be trusted. And though these images can delight and amaze, they can also paralyze and terrify. There are times when we are shamed by the most fleeting savage fancy.

Si soy un ángel, píntame con alas negras.

Write it in your histories. Describe my house as you saw it, full of paintings and lamps, full of music and laughter, full of gaeity and warmth.

It was as if that distant bed were a stage and on the linen pillows of the little stage lay that boy, his black hair parted in the middle and curling about his ears, so that he looked now in his dream, fevered state like one of those lithe androgynous creatures of a Botticelli painting; and beside him, nestled against him, her tiny white hand stark against his flesh lay Claudia, her face buried in his neck.

He could not paint, he could not touch the brushes. It was as if the colors, when raw, burnt his eyes.

Twist the poetry as you will.

Se anche non restasse più una sola opera d'arte al mondo... e ce ne sono migliaia... se non ci fosse più una sola bellezza naturale... se il mondo si riducesse a una sola cella vuota e una sola fragile candela, non posso fare a meno di vederti là a studiare quella candela, assorto nel tremolio della sua luce, nel cambiamento dei suoi colori.»

I thought in my secret heart of Botticelli, the man himself standing in his studio staring at me, wondering helplessly what sort of patron I was, and never dreaming that my hunger and adoration were conmingled, never dreaming of a danger which had come so close.

It was my own head, in semi-profile, carved skillfully from a fine piece of double-strata sardonyx so that the image was entirely white and remarkably detailed. The background was a pure and shining black.

You, Marius, you steal the Queen of Heaven and you keep her as if she were your own? You lock her up in a painted chapel as if she were a goddess made of wood?

Allow me to watch at the garden window in silence as you paint your walls.

I didn't stand and take stock of what I meant to do. Rather I went at it fiercely, covering the wall in great glowing patches, making the usual garden which obsessed me, and the nymphs and goddesses whose forms were so familiar to my mind.

She liked all things that were sensual and which involved beauty.

I had to know who this painter was. I had to see his work. I had fallen in love with him. Was he young? Was he old? Was he alive? Was he dead? I had to know.