Quotes About Art

I discovered that living is the original art.

Essentially, all expression has two noble intentions: to try to say what is unsayable and to bear witness to what is.

If you're a writer, you've chosen art as a way of life. You must accept that some will like your work and others will not. It's the life you chose, so live with it and don't complain.

If you write what you love everything else will follow.

Imagination is a gift waiting to be opened. A writer must peel back the wrapping and share that offering with the world.

Sometimes,I open a book I wrote. Reading the words, they seem to have come from some hidden recess of my mind, far from my waking self, from another mysterious realm. It's a mystery to me. It's the magic of the mind.

One of the reasons you can't learn everything you need to know about leadership from a seminar or a book is that leadership is, ultimately, an art.

Structure is an art. In some ways, it's the only art.

Death is the Mother of Beauty

I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

You adapt yourself, Paul Klee said, to the contents of the paintbox. Adapting yourself to the contents of the paintbox, he said, is more important than nature and its study. The painter, in other words, does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

Giacometti said, "The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.

Nothing rose to plug the gap, to address what some called "ultimate concerns," unless you count the arts, the arts that lacked both epistemological methods and accountability, and that drew nutty people, or drove them nuts.

Bad poetry is almost always bad because it attempts to claim for itself the real power of whatever it describes in ten lines: a sky full of stars, first love, or Niagara Falls.

It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away.

If you like metaphysics, throw pots.

Beauty itself is the fruit of the creator's exuberance....

Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.

Photography is not something you retire from.

For me, the story about the pictures is about almost losing myself, and coming back, and what it means to be deeply involved in a subject. The thing that saved me was that I had my camera by my side. It was there to remind me who I was and what I did. It separated me from them.

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

I have often said that the negative is similar to a musician's score, and the print to the performance of that score. The negative comes to life only when performed as a print.

Bello es lo que se contempla

Así como antes la equitación, el tiro con arco y el don de lenguas se consideraban artes «masculinas» fundamentales, de adquisición imprescindible para todo aspirante a caballero, así debería contemplarse el arte de la cocina.