Quotes About Art

All I taught him of art, of history, of beauty, of civilization-all this was meaningless to him.

Puede que en definitiva todas las canciones sean un lamento, un grito organizado.

I loved Amadeo as I had loved Pandora. I loved him as I had loved Botticelli. Amadeo was among these, the great loves of my long life.

Even if his eyes were dull as though the dazzling colors of my paintings did not matter to him, was he not near at hand?

La poesía debería tomarse en pequeñas dosis. Nadie necesita poesía. Nadie necesita obligarse a leerla.

We had been made over into portraits of ourselves in marble by a master sculptor.

What tribe on earth has not had elders? How much of our art and our knowledge comes from those who've lived into old age? You sound like Lestat when you say such things, speaking of his Savage Garden. The world has never seemed a hopelessly savage place to me.

He looked rather splendid in his sorrow. Again he made me think of the paintings of Andrea del Sarto. There was something lush in his beauty, for all the sharp and clear well-drawn lines of his eyes and mouth.

For me, writing was the only way out.

didn't paintings lie also? They showed hours instead of minutes.

Si je devais attendre d'avoir envie, je n'écrirais jamais.

He drew the brush along the wood with dreamy strokes. Wasn't it interesting how the grain of the wood told a story, almost—how you could follow the threads and be surprised at how far they traveled, or where they unexpectedly broke off.

It is no less difficult to write a sentence in a recipe than sentences in Moby Dick. So you might as well write Moby Dick.

Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, It is the trade entering his body. The art must enter the body, too.

I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes.

Van Gogh is utterly dead; the world may be fixed, but it never was broken. And shadow itself may resolve into beauty.

But there is no one but us. There never has been. There have been generations which remembered, and generations which forgot; there has never been a generation of whole men and women who lived well for even one day. Yet some have imagined well, with honesty and art, the detail of such a life, and have described it with such grace, that we mistake vision for history, dream for description, and fancy that life has devolved.

He had been a boy who liked to draw, according to my friend, so he became an architect. Children who drew,I learned, became architects; I had thought they became painters. My friend explained that it was not proper to become a painter; it couldn't be done. I resigned myself to architecture school and a long life of drawing buildings. It was a pity, for I disliked buildings, considering them only a stiffer and more ample form of clothing, and no more important.

Now the thing is no longer a vision: it is paper.

That girl in the painting looks so fierce, so strong. I want her to be the truth of me.

the things we write, they aren't always really us.

We writers always get our revenge on paper

If I had loved her... would that be art?

Humans don't mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It's time for that to end.