Quotes About Art

Giants of literature, philosophy, and the arts have influenced my life, but what have I done with this life? I remain a speck in a tumultuous universe that has little concern for me. I am no more than dust, a mote - dust to dust. I am a blade of grass upon which the stormtrooper's boot stomps.

Writing one's story narcotizes it. Literature today is an opiate.

Of course I received various permutations of the "Who will want to marry you if you read so much?" lecture, but I also had to endure the chilly "Don't try to be so different from normal people." Different from normal people? When I first heard that, I was sorely offended. 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?

Literature gives me life and life kills me.

I bet you believe in the redemptive power of art. I'm sure you do. I did. Such a romantic notion. Art will rescue the world, lift humanity above the horrible quagmire it's stuck in. Art will save you.

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?

I have on my table a violin string. It is free to move in any direction I like. If I twist one end, it responds; it is free. But it is not free to sing. So I take it and fix it into my violin. I bind it and when it is bound, it is free for the first time to sing.

The song being great in its own wealth, why should it wait upon the words? Rather does it begin where mere words fail. Its power lies in the region of the inexpressible; it tells us what the words cannot.

The water vessel, taken as a vessel only, raises the question, "Why does it exist at all?" Through its fitness of construction, it offers the apology for its existence. But where it is a work of beauty it has no question to answer; it has nothing to do, but to be.

Our music draws the listener away, beyond the limits of everyday human joys and sorrows, and takes us to that lonely region of renunciation which lies to the root of the universe, while European music leads us to a variegated dance through the endless rise and fall of human grief and joy.

My useless life can only break out in tunes without a purpose. (#15)

Life's memories are not life's history, but the original work of an unseen artist

genuine courtesy is a creation, like pictures, like music. It is a harmonious blending of voice, gesture and movement, words and action, in which generosity of conduct is expressed. It reveals the man himself and has no ulterior purpose.

The world speaks to me in pictures, my soul answers in music.

Consciously or unconsciously, I may have done many things that were un-true, but I have never uttered anything false in my poetry ? that is the sanctuary where the deepest truths of my life find refuge.

In fact, man has been able to make his pursuit of power easier to-day by his art of mitigating the obstructive forces that came from the higher region of his humanity.

I thought I would write love's words in their own colour; but that lies deep in the heart, and tears are pale. Would you know them, friend, if the words were colourless? I thought I would sing love's words to their own tune, but that sounds only in my heart, and my eyes are silent. Would you know them, friend, if there were no tune?

The literature of the new age seeks not to narrate a sequence of events, but to reveal the secrets of the heart.

Mitte üksnes poeesias, vaid ka üldse kogu kunstis peab kunstniku meel saavutama teatud eemalehoidmisastme - ainujuhtimine tuleb anda loojale inimese sees. Kui ainestik saab loomingust võitu on tagajärjeks sündmuse pelk koopia, mitte aga selle peegeldamine läbi kunstniku meele.

It was perfectly possible to become the prisoner of an artist's vision, I said. Like love, I said, being understood creates the fear that you will never be understood again.

Writing comes out of tension, tension between what's inside and what's outside.

A visit to the cinema is no longer that: it is less, a tarnished thing, an alloyed pleasure.

the translator says that a sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal. Those lines concerned the art of writing, but looking around himself in early middle age my neighbour began to see that they applied just as much to the art of living.

I have this theory that most artists never leave childhood, that you're endlessly trying to work out what happened. And leaving university and facing this idea that there is something called adult life that I was going to enter and get a job – I just couldn't. So writing became what I did as soon as I stopped studying.