- If they don't know what you're doin'
- Babe it must be art.
U2, "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me"
If art reflects life, it does so with special mirrors.
BERTOLT BRECHT, A Short Organum for the Theatre
In the arts, people are always waiting for someone or some movement to "fulfill her/its/his promise." Then, half-a-dozen or a dozen years on, others begin to realize that, really, something extraordinary was actually happening.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, SF Site interview, Apr. 2001
The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.
MAXIM GORKY, Untimely Thoughts
The job of mass entertainment is to cajole, seduce and flatter consumers to let them know that what they thought was right is right, and that their tastes and their immediate gratification are of the utmost concern of the purveyor. The job of the artist, on the other hand, is to say, wait a second, to the contrary, everything that we have thought is wrong. Let's reexamine it.
DAVIE MAMET, Salon interview, 1997
Art isn't about following the rules. It's about breaking them.
DAVID SEDARIS, When You Are Engulfed in Flames
An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Paris Review, spring 1956
Art ... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Art Objects
The artist and the multitude are natural enemies. They always will be, both ways. The artist is an enemy of the multitude, and the multitude is the enemy of the artist. And when the disguise comes off and they're both standing facing one another, they're just there at odds end.
ROBERT ALTMAN, F. Anthony Macklin interview, 1976
I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm.
SAUL BELLOW, The Paris Review, winter 1966
That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman—-the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.
TRUMAN CAPOTE, Truman Capote: Conversations
The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.
MARCEL PROUST, Within a Budding Grove
Ah, well, during the Middle Ages, religion was often able to redeem art. Today, however, art is about the only thing that can redeem religion, and the clerics will never forgive us for that.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, Dhalgren
The artist who is after success lets himself be influenced by the public. Generally such an artist contributes nothing new, for the public acclaims only what it already knows, what it recognizes.
ANDRE GIDE, Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality
Works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.
REBECCA WEST, Harriet Hume
True art required the right amount of uncertainty, just as gourmet cooking needed the proper spices and flavors.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON, The Butlerian Jihad
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