Quotes about Art

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got.

I read R.D. Laing, I read Victor Frankl. Anything by Ken Kesey or Peter Matthiessen, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, R. Crumb, Bob Dylan. These sacred texts are passed from one hand to another like relics of a religious past or harbingers of a new faith.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

In the face of legalized pornography, the conscience of America seems to be paralyzed. More serious than our fakery in art, literature, and pictures is the collapse of our moral standards and the blunting of our capacity as a nation for righteous indignation.

The study of art that does not result in making the strong less willing to suppress the weak means little.

First poems! They must be written on casual scraps of faded paper, interspersed here and there with withered flowers, or a lock of blond hair, or a discolored piece of ribbon, and the trace of a tear must still be visible in several places ... But first poems that are printed, in livid black and white, on dreadfully smooth paper are poems that have lost the finest points of their sweet, virginal charm, and now arouse a ghastly feeling of distaste in the author.

Virgil is serene and lovely like a marble Apollo in the moonlight; Homer is a beautiful, animated youth in the full sunlight with the wind in his hair.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

For thousands of years, human beings have been obsessed with beauty, truth, love, honor, altruism, courage, social relationships, art, and God. They all go together as subjective experiences, and it's a straw man to set God up as the delusion. If he is, then so is truth itself or beauty itself.

I read the Bible to myself; I'll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.

Despite all the cynical things writers have said about writing for money, the truth is we write for love. That is why it is so easy to exploit us.