Quotes by Subject: Art
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Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth. | |||
Immature artists imitate, mature artists steal. | |||
Nothing happens unless first a dream. | |||
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be. | * | ||
A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something. | |||
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it. | * | ||
Anything too stupid to be spoken is sung. | * | ||
Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees. | |||
There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad. | |||
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. | |||
Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. | |||
The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No.' | * | ||
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. | |||
It's only words...unless they're true. | |||
To see things in the seed, that is genius. | * | ||
I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have gone ourselves. | |||
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. | |||
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. | |||
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. | |||
Happiness is something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else. | * | ||
A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines. | |||
Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design. | |||
Dare to be naive. | |||
Never let the facts get in the way of telling a good story. | * | ||
Being on a tightrope is living; everything else is waiting. | |||
Writing is like sex; at first you do it for the sheer joy of it, then you start doing it for a few friends. Next thing you know, you're doing it for money. | |||
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival. | |||
Art washes away from the soul dust of everyday life. | |||
Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't. | |||
The body is a sacred garment. | |||
The way to become boring is to say everything. | |||
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. | |||
Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish. | |||
I am not a teacher but an awakener. | * | ||
If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. | |||
Every artist was first an amateur. | |||
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give up because by that time I was too famous. | |||
Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can. | |||
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. | * | ||
If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice. | |||
Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped. | |||
Art is either plagiarism or revolution. | |||
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. | |||
I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time. | |||
About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment. | |||
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. | |||
There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you. | |||
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say. | * | ||
You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. | |||
The multitude of books is making us ignorant. | * | ||
We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it. | |||
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. | |||
Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable. | * | ||
A solution should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. | * | ||
Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon. | |||
You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance. | |||
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. | |||
The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it. | |||
There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you. | * | ||
Never fall in love with an idea. They're whores: if the one you're with isn't doing the job, there's always, always, always another. | * | ||
A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits. | |||
If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you. | * | ||
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun. | |||
True creativity is characterized by a succession of acts each dependent on the one before and suggesting the one after. | * | ||
If more than ten percent of the population likes a painting it should be burned, for it must be bad. | |||
The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good. | |||
Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable. | * | ||
Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace. | * | ||
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see. | * | ||
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. | |||
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened. | |||
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies. | * | ||
In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from. | |||
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened. | |||
I love acting. It is so much more real than life. | |||
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. | * | ||
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. | * | ||
The only unbecoming conduct would be my silence. | * | ||
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time. | * | ||
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight. | |||
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. - from "The Road Not Taken" | |||
Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it. | |||
Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented. | * | ||
There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. | |||
Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings. | |||
Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well. | |||
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known. | |||
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you. | * | ||
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. | |||
A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor. | |||
Everything you can imagine is real. | |||
Real art is without irony. Irony distances the author from his material. Irony is a product of something. It's not the reason for doing something. Irony is a cheap shot. | |||
Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. | |||
If you don't feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn't very vital. If you don't feel like you are writing somewhat over your head, why do it? If you don't have some doubt of your authority to tell this story, then you are not trying to tell enough. | |||
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. | |||
I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it shorter. | |||
The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime. | |||
Music is essentially useless, as life is. | * | ||
Tradegy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down an open manhole cover and die. | * | ||
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. | |||
There are two kinds of light--the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures. | |||
A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. | |||
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time. | |||
I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time. | * | ||
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf. | * | ||
Causing the right amount of trouble is an art form. | * | ||
Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake. | |||
I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately. | * | ||
Doodling is the brooding of the hand. | |||
The secret of life is in art. | * | ||
All drama is about lies. When the lie is exposed, the play is over. | * | ||
Turn your back on the money and start walking toward your your goals. The money is the problem not the solution. Stop using it as an excuse. | |||
It is the unlikely things that have power, that are transformative. | * | ||
Recognize that the golden age is right now. We're not waiting for it to arrive. We're creating it. | |||
Theater makes a space for what we don't see in the world. | |||
Art exists to be your friend when you have no other friends. To talk to you when no one talks to you. Leading you through the darkest time in your life. That cave you go into when you need to change your life. | |||
*indicates a past Quote of The Week
