I drew a portrait of an invisible man on a nice canvas, because that's all you see. Oh, and I used a nice frame. I think that's important. I believe the best art uses the most imagination.
The art of letting go is simply about personal empowerment. Realizing what you’re in charge of, realizing what you control, and more importantly, what you don’t control.
The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselv...
Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one's wall, even if for only a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again.
As long as we know what it's about, then we can have the courage to go wherever we are asked to go, even if we fear that the road may take us through danger and pain.
Aeschylus writes, "In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grade of God.
It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.
How much distance should there be between art and artist? I’d say no more than a lifetime.
Living well is an art that can be developed: a love of life and ability to take great pleasure from small offerings and assurance that the world owes you nothing and that every gift is exactly that, a gift.
Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so s...
It seems an odd idea to my students that poetry, like all art, leads us away from itself, back to the world in which we live. It furnishes the vision. It shows with intense clarity what is already there.
Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become ab...
Art, he said, was a controlled madness...He said that books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.
For what it's worth, I think perfect love stories have perfect disasters hidden somewhere. If a genuine relationship comes out of two people screwing before they saw the potential of the 'relationship'? Its perfect, beautiful, a work of art in fact.....
There are too many images, too many cameras now. We’re all being watched. It gets sillier and sillier. As if all action is meaningful. Nothing is really all that special. It’s just life. If all moments are recorded, then nothing is beautiful and ...
Fiction writing is art. It therefore, has few mathematical or scientific limits to its evolution. The writer must always push forward, experiment, and strive to reach new levels of storytelling. Good fiction comments on reality, but transports the re...
I like to imagine that library school was started because of some sort of silly bar bet where a guy got really plastered and told his buddy that he could convince people that librarians needed to be trained in the art of librarianship. Sadly, this is...
Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to imagine possibilities and then turn those possibilities into realities. Evident in the gifts of civilization—in our arts, languages, sciences, technologies, businesses, governments, and so on—it is c...
I would passionately make the case that the harder the times, the more we need things that aren't just about keeping our job and making a buck - important though those things are. Arts programming isn't some sort of add-on or ornamental luxury.
To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an ide...
There's also the tradition of voodoo, the Haitian magic arts, in New Orleans. And because New Orleans is below sea level, when they bury people in New Orleans, it's mostly above ground. So you have this idea that the spirits are more accessible and c...
