Quotes
Quotes about Art
I cannot waste my whole life in longing for this man's art and that man's scope
... he sighed, knowing himself to be caught forever between worlds - earth and air, reason and belief, action and contemplation. Alone among all sorts of men, he embraced a poet's martyrdom
I can hardly move, sick not in my body but only in my soul, centre of my sinful earth
And so earth took that poor boy. What could earth not take?
Nothing stayed still. A man changed his lodging, his place of work, his mistress; between man and wife love could die, a man's art or skill grew or languished or merely changed, and all beyond his control
To emboss a stamp of order on time's flux is an impossibility I must make possible through my art, such as it is
Do not start talking of dragon-slayers - for out of dragon's blood are formed new dragons. Let them sleep, all of them
There is no such thing as the death of anything. There is no making new, there is only renewal. The earth turns and there is no new day, only a renewal of the old. In tomorrow's bread there will be a piece of today's dough
It was the agony of knowing that it was departed, all, the insanity of former love, leaving behind this deadly godlike sobriety of self-pity
The reader is asked first to look for diversion and to forget about art, which is solely the artist's concern
Art at the last was between the artist and his god
Any good poet anywhere knows some Dante by heart
... he had rested and tried not to think of the agonies already sprining like warts from the long poem he had to write
Art is not anything but art
How else can a man save his soul save through art of some kind or other?
A saint's life, I suppose, is a kind of art, in which the material is not stone or words or paint but conduct
Is not the imagination part of the soul?
Treat a Roman well and he will begin to think there is a catch somewhere and start brooding revolution
It is literature that counts. You embrace a kind of martyrdom to write what you have to write
You go nowhere now - into the earth. I take on your burdens. The son becomes the father
We understand that art is a kind of neurosis, but does that make us reject beauty?
A diseased body is as tyrannical as any upstart dictator
You start off with time, and if you have time you have to have history. But you only get history when you put things inside time
Do you insist that a painter have a degree in painting before he starts to paint? Should Shakespeare have had a degree in dramatic literature?
The world was once all miracle. Then everything started to be explained
