Quotes About Art

I know better than any one what to think about my own plans, and I am always astonished that the critics dig so deep for them, when the simplest ideas, the most commonplace incidents, are the only inspiration to which the products of art owe their being. ~ April 12, 1851 in the Notice

La nature est une oeuvre d'art, mais Dieu est le seul artiste qui existe, et l'homme n'est qu'un arrangeur de mauvais goût. La nature est belle, le sentiment s'exhale de tous ses pores; l'amour, la jeunesse, la beauté y sont impérissables. Mais l'homme n'a pour les sentir et les exprimer que des moyens absurdes et des facultés misérables. Il vaudrait mieux qu'il ne s'en mêlat pas, qu'il fût muet et se renfermât dans la contemplation.

Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to real life -- he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.

A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.

That's all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world. The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence.

The work that stirs the greatest passion is also the work that creates around it the greatest silence, the strongest imperative to stand back and admire and let others admire, without interfering.

The writer,' said Donald Barthelme, 'is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.' In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious.

It is less, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it's more, too—it's small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours.

In my view, all art begins in that instant of intuitive preference.

A story is a really weird art object that should contain life but not be enslaved by the banality.

Criticism is not some inscrutable, mysterious process. It's just a matter of: (1) noticing ourselves responding to a work of art, moment by moment, and (2) getting better at articulating that response.

Art is a reminder that you actually do contain multitudes--and that's OK.

A work of art moves us by being honest and that honesty is apparent in its language and its form and in its resistance to concealment.

To write a story that works, that moves the reader, is difficult, and most of us can't do it. Even among those who have done it, it mostly can't be done. And it can't be done from a position of total control, of flawless mastery, of simply having an intention and then knowingly executing it. There's intuition involved, and stretching—trying things that are at the limit of our abilities.

Art, at its best, is a kind of uncontrolled yet disciplined Yelp, made by one of us who, because of the brain he was born with and the experiences he has had and the training he has received, is able to emit a Yelp that contains all of the joys, miseries, and contradictions of life as it is actually lived.

It means that language can make worlds that don't and could never exist.

Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life"—he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.

My point is that it's not the flavor of your taste that matters; it's the intensity with which you apply your taste that will cause the resulting work of art to feel highly organized.

Art doesn't have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly." "Formulate them correctly" might be taken to mean: "make us feel the problem fully, without denying any part of it.

Great works of art pass through us like storm-winds, flinging open the doors of perception, pressing upon the architecture of our beliefs with their transforming powers.

One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures. (Face palm!)

only poetry, exempt from all practical applications, permits one to have at its disposal, to a certain extent, the brilliance and suffocation that Marquis de Sade tried so indecently to provoke.` Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess. Selected Writings 1927-1939, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2004, p. 93

Above all, they had the cinema. And this was probably the only area where they had learned everything from their own sensibilities.

The main thing for inner contentment is to be in a state of grace. And there is an artistic state of grace, for art is a kind of religion.