Quotes
Quotes about Art
I am not having this sort of nonsense, do you hear? You never take art for what it is â beauty, ultimate meaning, form for its own sake, self-subsisting.
Relaxation comes between phases of tenseness. Art is essentially tense.
And yet he was supposed to start thinking of death. It was the leaving of things unfinished that was so intolerable. It was all very well for Jesus Christ, not himself a writer though no mean orator, to talk about not thinking of the morrow. If youâd started a long poem you had to think of the bloody morrow.
People always blame art literature drama for their own evil. Or other peopleâs. Art only imitates life.
It was a matter of being integer vitae and also of having committed himself to a world in which pure and simple aggression was to be accepted as part of the human fabric.
I am near the end of the wine, but out there, the big wine is being poured â thin, slow, grey. Never more shall I taste the oncoming of this particular darkness. But I shall not be sorry to go. I am not seduced to this life by the dainty lusts, clothed in cold green and clean linen, of an English spring. If you plunge into that dark there, you will emerge at length into a raging sun and all the fabled islands of my East. And that is what I shall be doing tonight, off like a bird. Letâs dwell a space on the irony of a poetâs desperately winging out the last of his sweetness while the corrosives closed in.
The autobiographer can see himself as the only true historian in the sense that he is presenting the life of perennial humanity. In the narrower sense, he provides the raw material for the social historian, demonstrating what it was like to be imprisoned in a particular segment of time.
Some men's sexual limit is the pit. Its rage can find a counterpart in how they mangle, tear and rape their art.
Aesthetic martyrs ought to kiss the stars, rejoice in being totally rejected, and work away like disregarded beavers.
And this new start meant a new leaf, life, willingness to atone, a search for stability, a fresh persona.
So a useless truth obtrudes on to a most ravishing lie. I would say finally that, as the earth turns and the truth of summer and the lie of winter interchange, so the bulky ball of history revolves, and what a man dies for may become the thing that dies for him.
I will not force apart the jaws of heaven for my precocious entering. Heaven may open in its own good time without my prompting.
The reality of literature, as opposed to its appearance in written of printed records, is the organization of speech sounds, and this makes literature a temporal art, a twin of music.
A work of art is traditionally characterized in terms of unity of conception and execution
Mozart was the last of the great composers
It is because literature has no power to imitate the sound of music that it is led to mockery of its sister art
The novel form calls for a rigidity of control of the linguistic medium which forbids the freer art of the poet. Language must be transparent, not opaque.
Any serious literary artist envies music, which has an apparently self-referrÃng language, cannot preach or inform, and totally identifies form and content
It is enough to get on with the task of creating art without asking why one is doing it
Then perhaps to die the death. An endless silence after a brief earth-sejourn. All the putative joys untasted. Circular speculation. A life wasted.
Can art be art if it so sickens?
Life pays too much for art
See how the live earth flowers. The land speaks my intent. Bear me accompaniment.
Life is for you. My portrait is of an empty cup, a melon-rind, a crushed yoghourt carton, a stamped-out Schimmelpennick.
Music is a purer art (than literature) because it has no direct relationship to human events. It is totally outside the field of moral judgment
