Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock.
Captive Greece took captive her savage conquerer and brought the arts to rustic Latium
With all art expression, when something is seen, it is a vivid experience, sudden, compelling, and inevitable.
If the bards of old the true has told The sirens have raven hair. But over the earth since art had birth, They paint the angels fair.
For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian──ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection that unattainable by the highest art.
The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.
Gloria was still talking, something about how shooting people was in a sense safer than making art, in terms of avoiding serious lapses in taste.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
...you called me poet-priest - I am. ...devoted to my art, faithful to you...or, is the other way around?...
...art is weaker than life - in the end I have a bag of letters to scrabble into order - rune tiles to cast my fate...
...I know Shakespeare said art is holding up a mirror to nature- but you're actually bending and refracting it through your interior dialogue ...
The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.
One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge.
You don’t rewrite it, censor it, or edit it, to suit some warped view you have of the past and your own present.
I would have married her before I went away to war too, just to make sure that someone else didn’t.
The main thing for inner contentment is to be in a state of grace. And there is an artistic state of grace, for art is a kind of religion.
Art has something to do with beauty. The act of creating beauty pulls the portion of your soul to the surface that is true to the way you were created.
Begging is much more difficult than it looks. Contrary to popular belief, it’s a high art form that takes years of dedicated practice to master.
The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.
On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
Art, in a sense, is life brought to a standstill, rescued from time. The secret of making it is simple: discard everything that is good enough.
