For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play wit...
Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch.
It didn't get better, not in my book. I mean if you weren't looking too hard at what just happened or who might be down the road or at some other stuff. Maybe living well is the art of not looking at that, at the other stuff, when you don't have to. ...
To me this is the first principle of life, the foundational principle, and a lesson you can't learn at the foot of any wise man: Get up! The art of living is simply getting up after you've been knocked down.
The mob not only grabs hold of art without being entitled to do so, but it also enters the artist. It takes up residence inside the artist and smashes a few holes in the wall, windows to the outer world: The mob wants to be seen.
I find it a privilege and an honor to be human, for to me, one of the most wondrous and beautiful things in the universe, is found in human form. Because to be human, is to be able to dream dreams of pyramids and skyscrapers, and majestic works of ar...
You could say my book is the best book ever (or worst book ever), and it wouldn’t make it any better (or worse) than it is. All art exists outside and beyond criticism.
Art is like a kite with an airplane propeller, OK? Artists are like people who have scuba tanks for lungs, OK? And critics are like a box of forgotten leftovers in my fridge from a few years ago, except they’re not as welcome at my dinner table, OK...
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.
