Quotes About Art

A great artist transforms our world, removes scales from our eyes, plugs from our ears, gloves from our fingertips and teaches us to perceive reality differently.

Each time we explore Bach's music we feel as if we have traveled great distances to, and through, a remote but entrancing soundscape

Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.

It is fatal to suppose the great writer was too wise or too profound for us ever to understand him; to think of art so is not to praise but to murder it, for the next step after that tribute will be neglect of the masterpiece.

I would stare at that strange picture, kissing it and crying over it, happy because once it had been true.

To further the appreciation of culture among all the people, to increase respect for the creative individual, to widen participation by all the processes and fulfillments of art - this is one of the fascinating challenges of these days.

Then her mother – as skilled in the art of ambush as most mothers are – startled her with her furious, echoing roar.

Crea spazi vuoti. Nel calcio come nella vita, nella pittura, nella musica, i vuoti e i silenzi sono importanti come i pieni. (Helenio Herrera)

You have to take chances for peace, just as you must take chances in war…. The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies

I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.

Often the first poem is the hardest, the one caught by a lifetime of being smaller than you are, trapped by your ideas of what art is, what an artist is, immobilized by the judgments of teachers whose names you may never again remember. How did we come to forget that anything true is beautiful? How young were we then?

the secret to writing is to get your own pain - shout it out till it hurts your throat - weep it into your pillow - then write it down ...

I gave you painted air - tears I couldn't weep - truths I couldn't speak - all the words that caught in my throat...

I worship at the temple of your body and without you, I'd have no art...

when you're hard and unyielding your words score me with lines - I hate lines - I want curves - curves are happy like a snowman ...

God daubs stars into galaxies with fiery paint - the same lacquer he uses upon your lips...

yes I speak a different language - the dark fire of poetry - it flutters and gutters in tune with the mood ...

these vignettes I sketch for you - what are they? watercolors ..yes and dreams blurred with tears ...

you called me poet-priest - I am. ...devoted to my art, faithful to you...or, is the other way around?...

what is art to the dilettante but the initiation of the sacred few to the exclusion of the profane crowd?...

my writing is a wild mustang - more thunderous than a lightning storm -and all my skill which I call art, is devoted to simply staying on...