Quotes
Quotes about Art
Sex, like art, is essentially anarchistic - both are values worth preserving
All art is risk and I think we have to accept that risk, hence accept living dangerously
We must not forget that writing is a trade as well as an art, and we only write those things that we can sell
Spending half an hour or an hour, or two hours, on a piece of narrative fiction gives us the same kind of holistic, the same kind of total effect, the effect of being absorbed in an artistic experience without interruption that we get from listening to a piece of music
Everything we've experienced on earth seems to point toward the permanence of pain
The characters of an art novel resist the structure which their creators try to impose on them; they want to go their own way. They do not even want the book to come to an end
The difference between the so-called art novel and the popular variety is perhaps that in the first the human beings are more important than the action and in the second it is the other way about
There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.
Art begins with craft, and there is not art until craft has been mastered
Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.
..the people of Tudor England, like the modern Irish, were great talkers. One imagines their speech as rapid, bubbling, both earthily exact and carelessly malapropistic. It was perhaps a McLuhanesque medium, itself its own message and it exhibited the essential function of language - to maintain social contact in the dark.... Speech, when you come to think of it, is not a very exact medium: it is full of stumblings and apologies for not finding the right word; it has to be helped out with animal grunts and the gestures which, one is convinced, represent man's primal mode of communication. Take speech as a flickering auditory candle, and the mere act of maintaining its light becomes enough. Tales, gossip, riddles, word-play pass the time in the dark, and out of these - not out of the need to recount facts or state a case - springs literature.
Nobody ought to think that he is worth writing about. This is especially true of professional writers. They are not remarkable people, and if they are novelists they are particularly lacking in interest.
There is no art without cheating. That is why Plato and Tolstoy condemned literature
People, even stepmothers, are not to be condemned for lack of art or aitches
I wait no longer now: wide lies the way, unsure, uncharted. Only this I know: the sea has dubious currents
I knew most of Hopkins by heart, and still do
The short story stops as soon as it starts - a symphonic exposition with no development section, no recapitulation, no coda
Love and art are not compatible
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
The informed part of the reading public should be sufficient to bring an author back into print, or, if he is still in print, keep him there
For my part, I see only good in fecundity
The earth's resources are not infinite, a birth's another burden in a hungry world
I say: turn once more to the necessity to learn ... leave inarticulacy to the loathed nude apes up there: let us at least be clothed
His heart had dropped, shattered like a cold stale pastry dropped on to the kitchen flags
To be born ... is to start to die
