Quotes About Art

There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.

The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. ----- A Clockwork Orange Resucked intro to first full American version 1986

I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.

Look, I don't see why bad artists - I mean artists who are obviously incompetent... - why they should be presented hypocritically as good artists just because they're supposed to be advancing the frontiers of freedom of expression or... ...demonstrating that there should be no limit on subject matter.

To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.

Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language

A work of art is somehow organic, and to slash a painting or smash a statue is not just an offence against property: it is an offence against life.

you are out of the field of the novel

Toplumun onaylad??? eylemlerin d???na ç?kam?yorsun, sadece iyilik yapabilen küçük bir makinesin. Ayr?ca ÅŸu marjinal koÅŸullanmalar meselesinin… içyüzünü aç?kça görüyorum. Müzik ve cinsellik, edebiyat ve sanat, art?k bunlar haz deÄŸil ac? veriyordur herhalde. (syf. 136 – 137)

Verbal description of everything, however, must remain infinitely distant from the thing itself, overstatement and understatement sometimes hitting off the truth better than a flat assertion of bare fact.

This person was standing under Lavery's portrait of Lady Walpole-Wilson, painted at the time of her marriage, in a white dress and blue sash, a picture he was examining with the air of one trying to fill in the seconds before introductions begin to take place, rather than on account of a deep interest in art.

Moreland could never get used to the fact that most people—in this particular case, Templer—lead lives in which the arts play no part whatsoever.

Fischbein stood in front of Zouch with his hands on his hips. He had a grey face, full of folds and swellings of loose flesh, like a piece of bad realistic sculpture.

There are not more than five primary colors, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever be seen. —SUN TZU, The Art of War

The movers and shakers of the world are often professional modelers—people who have mastered the art of learning everything they can by following other people's experience rather than their own. They know how to save the one commodity none of us ever get enough of—time.

I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.

I sometimes think you despise poetry,' said Phineas. 'When it is false I do. The difficulty is to know when it is false and when it is true.

She well knew the great architectural secret of decorating her constructions, and never descended to construct a decoration.

This kind of consolation from the world's deceit is very common. Mothers obtain it from their children, and men from their dogs. Some men even do so from their walking-sticks, which is just as rational. How is it that we can take joy to ourselves in that we are not deceived by those who have not attained the art to deceive us?

The Sir Charles Grandison business is done and gone. That's what you mean, I suppose? Don't you think we should find it very heavy if we tried to get it back again?" "I'm not going to ask you to be a Sir Charles Grandison, Mr. Eames. But never mind all that now. Do you know that that girl has absolutely had her first sitting for the picture?

All writing is pigshit.

If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.

The theater is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.