Quotes About Art

I lived in art, I lived in love, I never hurt a soul! (Vissi d'arte, vissi d'amore, non feci mai male ad anima viva! )

I have so much respect for people in the theater. You can't do 10 or 15 takes. It's all live. It's like life in motion.

if you memorize three hundred Tang poems, you might be able to write a little.

I don't wait for inspiration. I'm not, in fact, quite sure what inspiration is, but I'm sure that if it is going to turn up, my having started work is the precondition of its arrival.

Without an element of vulgarity, no man can be a work of art...I have to try and think what an artist is, apart from a hooligan who cannot live within his income of praise.

Drawing is a science, painting is just something for the long winter evenings.

You can't write poetry on the computer.

Movies are my religion and God is my patron. I'm lucky enough to be in the position where I don't make movies to pay for my pool. When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me like I would die for it.

To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I'm writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I'm going to play for the opening sequence.

Movies are not about the weekend that they're released, and in the grand scheme of things, that's probably the most unimportant time of a film's life.

If you just love movies enough, you can make a good one.

I like it when somebody tells me a story, and I actually really feel that that's becoming like a lost art in American cinema.

La Strada, Yojimbo, Ikiru, The Bridge, Rififi, Bicycle Thieves, Rocco and His Brothers, Open City, Seven Samurai, Le Doulos, Bitter Rice (which Cliff thought was sexy as hell).

Now, many directors could and would say, So what? It's just a movie. You don't have to believe in giant monkeys to direct King Kong.

Cliff didn't know enough to write critical pieces for Films in Review, but he knew enough to know Hiroshima Mon Amour was a piece of crap. He knew enough to know Antonioni was a fraud.

There are very few perfect movies. This is okay, since in the pursuit of cinematic art, perfection shouldn't be the goal. Nevertheless, when it's accomplished (even by accident), it's an achievement.

For a child of five, art is life and life is art... but once the child is in school they get separated--art becomes art and life becomes life.

Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.

Nudity is an art. Besides, art is only nudity... There's no more art, only too much civilization. Art is barbarious... Art is loneliness... Nothingness is perfect nudity.

I slipped into art to escape life. I sneaked off into literature.

I thought every person should live for art, not just me, and furthermore, why would I want to be normal? Why would I want to be stupid like everyone else?

I know. You think you love art because you have a sensitive soul. Isn't a sensitive soul simply a means of transforming a deficiency into proud disdain? You think art has meaning. You think you're not like me.

You still cling to romantic notions about writing, that you'll be able to figure things out, that you will understand life, as if life is understandable, as if art is understandable. When has writing explained anything to you? Writing does not force coherence onto a discordant narrative.

Nick commenced a monologue explaining the impossibility of such a phenomenon: the subordination of content to the aesthetics of language in Arabic literature, the dominance of panegyrics and eulogies as an art form, etc.