Famous Quotes & Sayings

Annie Dillard

There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?

Annie Dillard

Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.

Annie Dillard

I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes.

Annie Dillard

Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.

Annabelle Selldorf

I'm inspired by looking at art, by looking at precedent. Looking is what you have to do if you want to make things, so you develop a critical eye.

Clay Aiken

I never want to produce anything that a family could not enjoy together. I never want to create art that would embarrass my own children later.

Claire Danes

Steve Martin is one of my favorite performers, writers, artists of all time.

Daniel Johnston

I've got something to live for, because I always wanted to be an artist; I always wanted to be famous.

Daniel Johnston

Listen up and I'll tell a story about an artist growing old. Some would try for fame and glory; others aren't so bold.

Daniel Johns

A lot of people who get into any art form have some form of mental..something in their head which is unstable

Daniel J. Boorstin

Creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story- a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Each living art object, taken out of its native habitat so we can conveniently gaze at it, is like an animal in a zoo. Something about it has died in the removal.

Daniel J. Boorstin

There is no known device for artistic contraception.

Daniel J. Boorstin

What is more natural in a democratic age than that we should begin to measure the stature of a work of art-especially of a painting-by how widely and how well it is reproduced?

D. Elton Trueblood

Engineering is a predictive science, not a manipulative art.

D. A. Carson

If God had perceived that our greatest need was economic, he would have sent an economist. If he had perceived that our greatest need was entertainment, he would have sent us a comedian or an artist. If God had perceived that our greatest need was political stability, he would have sent us a politician. If he had perceived that our greatest need was health, he would have sent us a doctor. But he perceived that our greatest need involved our sin, our alienation from him, our profound rebellion, our death; and he sent us a Savior.

Czeslaw Milosz

It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today, and so you may think that I am only joking or that I've devised just one more means of praising Art with the help of irony.

Czeslaw Milosz

It isn't pleasant to surrender to the hegemony of a nation which is still wild and primitive, and to concede the absolute superiority of its customs and institutions, science and technology, literature and art. Must one sacrifice so much in the name of the unity of mankind?

Czeslaw Milosz

Poetry is news brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.

D. H. Lawrence

The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one.

D. H. Lawrence

Sunday night meant, in the dark, wintry, rainy Midlands ... anywhere where two creatures might stand and squeeze together and spoon.... Spooning was a fine art, whereas kissing and cuddling are calf-processes.

D. H. Lawrence

We have lost the art of living, and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behavior, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.

D. H. Lawrence

The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.

D. H. Lawrence

The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.

D. H. Lawrence

Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness... meaning at-oneness, the state of being at one with the object.

D. H. Lawrence

After all, the world is not a stage-not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches...and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be...Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it if he wants a safe seat in the audience-let him read someone else.

D. H. Lawrence

Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him.

D. H. Lawrence

Art- speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day and that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day, and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.

D. H. Lawrence

What one does in one's art, that is the breath of one's being. What one does in one's life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.

D. H. Lawrence

Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.

D. H. Lawrence

Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!

D. H. Lawrence

It's not art for art's sake, it's art for my sake.

D. H. Lawrence

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.