"We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites."
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Art quotes
Art
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Art quotes (page 221 of 1107)
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"Art is created to make us, to make our passage through the world better, fruitful - and I would say that every story in the end, if it is good, tells us something. This is actually what I meant when I said a novelist is a teacher. Which is why I am constantly dealing with "didactic". Now a teacher in the sense I use it is not somebody who has the profession of standing in front of children, with a piece of chalk in his hand scribbling on the blackboard. That is not the teacher I have in mind. The teacher I have in mind is something less tangible."
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"Serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict."
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"I heard some famous people had an anniversary, five long years together, it was Hollywood history. Now my grandma and grandpa never made no printed page, but they took the love of 57 years right to the grave."
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"The provincial intellectual is doomed to arguing at low level... there is still no Australian literary world, not in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide. It is some consolation to realise that there is no literary world in Birmingham or Los Angeles either. I have heard there is one in Montreal, but I don't believe it. The literary world is in London and New York, the only cities big enough to sustain magazines which can afford to reject copy."
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"In the Year 2000 the discovery of extraterrestrial life will create a revolution in science, art, and pornography."
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"The challenge artists face today is whether to be an underground, unheard genius, or to dilute their art for the marketplace."
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"In science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it. ... In art nothing worth doing can be done without genius; in science even a very moderate capacity can contribute to a supreme achievement."
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"I started as an artist and I had a side job moving some heavy boxes for a publishing company. They had just gotten a Mac for their art department, the department that creates the book covers. I was kind of showing the art director a thing or two about how to use a Mac. And one day everyone went out to lunch and I jumped on the computer and designed a book jacket and slipped it in the pile to go to the review board in New York. They picked my jacket and when the art director got back to Boston, he wanted to know who designed it and I said, "Me." He was like, "The box guy?""
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"Some are masters of illusions, some are ministers of trade, all under the same delusion, all their beds unmade."
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"Anger and jealousy's all that he sells us, he's content when you're under his thumb. Madmen oppose him, but your kindness throws him, to survive it you play deaf and dumb."
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"Every single bit of entertainment is escapism. It's because you are saying, "Let's see what this other person's life is like." And also it's beyond escapism, its entertainment and art as such can elevate the species. The entertainer supposedly is the muse. They're the ones who tell you what is wrong with society in a humorous way. They're the ones who do an expose about this or a documentary about that about the injustice of this. So it can be a very powerful medium."
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"Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature."
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"All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it."
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"The pursuit of truth is just a polite name for the intellectual's favorite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality."
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"But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides."
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"Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty.... Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows. No Verdi, after all, without spitting into trumpets. No Duse without a crowd of malodorous bourgeois giving one another their coryzas. And think of the inexpugnable retreats for microbes prepared by Michelangelo in the curls of Moses' beard!"
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""Let the dead bury the dead." There is not a single word of Christ to which the Christian religion has paid less attention."
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"The work of art is the exaggeration of an idea."
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"Art? That's a man's name."
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