"Novels are political not because writers carry party cards -- some do, I do not -- but because good fiction is about identifying with and understanding people who are not necessarily like us. By nature all good novels are political because identifying with the other is political. At the heart of the 'art of the novel' lies the human capacity to see the world through others' eyes. Compassion is the greatest strength of the novelist."
Art quotes
Art
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Art quotes (page 184 of 1107)
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"I have made an art form of the interview. The French are the best interviewers, despite their addiction to the triad, like all Cartesians."
"If by day art is in the service of business, the evenings are devoted to the businessman's enjoyment of it. That is asking a lot of art, but art and the businessman make it work."
"All caught up in the trends, well the truth began to bend."
"If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings."
"Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank."
"All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay."
"Politics is the art of acquiring, holding, and wielding power."
"Art lies because it's social."
"Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic."
"The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach."
"Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life."
"The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity."
"All great ideas are dangerous."
"A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature."
"A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection."
"The ugly and stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live-- undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; my brains, such as they are-- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks-- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly."
"What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying."
"We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in Art."
"An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them."