Famous Quotes & Sayings

Clive Bell

Art and religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstacy.

Clive Bell

Art and relligion are not professions: they are not occupations for which men can be paid. The artist and the saint do what they have to do, not to make a living, but in obedience to some mysterious necessity. They do not product to live - they live to produce.

Clive Bell

All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.

Clive Bell

Let the artist have just enough to eat, and the tools of this trade: ask nothing of him. Materially make the life of the artist sufficiently miserable to be unattractive, and no-one will take to art save those in whom the divine daemon is absolute.

Clive Bell

The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art.

Clive Bell

It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal.

Clive Bell

What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? Only one answer seems possible— significant form. In each, lines and colors combined in a particular way; certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colors, these aesthetically moving forms, I call ‘Significant Form’; and ‘Significant Form’ is the one quality common to all works of visual art.

Clive Bell

A rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.

Clive Bell

The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.

Clive James

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.

Clive James

Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.

Clive James

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

Clive James

Almost 70 years have gone by, and I've still got that feeling when I write... Writing, for me, is still it. It has always been the basis of everything I do. I'm a writer who performs, not a performer who writes. I love the act of writing. It's still a thrill for me.

Clive James

Reading and writing... are exciting. The most exciting things I can think of. And now, as I reflect... I have to say that I've been lucky in that I'm amused by what I do - sufficiently amused.

Clive James

Among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it enables them to blame society for the fact that nobody wants to hear what they have to say.

Clive James

If an artist is any good at all, then he or she will have a later phase that's more interesting than the early one.

Clive Barker

The whole point about vision is that it's very individual, it's very personal, and it has to be confessional. It has to be something which hurts - the pulling out of it and putting it on the page hurts. Art can be about the individual writer's response to his or her condition, and if that response comes out of a predigested belief about what the audience wants to hear about the writer's condition, then it has no truth, it has no validity. You either write with your own blood or nobody's. Otherwise it's just ink.

Clive Barker

By and large I think art is made by people who have discipline married to talent in sufficiently large amounts to work even if they don't feel like it. Anybody can get maudlin and decide to write poetry at 11 at night; the question is, can you do it at 8:30 on a Monday morning..?

Clive Barker

There are lives lived for love, and lives lived for art. We, happy band, have chosen the later persuasion.

Clive Barker

My life is in the art that I make, and I'm very happy with it.

Clint Eastwood

Writing is a creative art form and the acting and directing is more of an interpretive art form.

Clint Eastwood

Acting to me is a very organic art form and you just go and do it. And I like to direct the same way that I like to be directed. Let me bring in what I want to bring in, and if something's wrong, just tell me about it and I'll make some corrections or adjustments. And that's what I do.

e. e. cummings

Art is a mystery. A mystery is something immeasurable.

e. e. cummings

Writingis an art; and artistsare human beings. As a human being stands, so a human being is

e. e. cummings

So far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was, is, and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality.

e. e. cummings

The Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself.

e. e. cummings

The Symbol of all Art is the Prism. The goal is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism into the secret glories it contains.

E. B. White

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.

Dries van Noten

I make clothes people can wear; I don't make art.

Douglas Davis

Art starts alone - and convinces society later.

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

I will never forget the pleasure and instruction I derived from working with a true master of his art, such as Edward G. Robinson was - and is. Surely his record for versatility, studied characterization - ranging from modern colloquial to the classics - and artistic integrity is unsurpassed.

Douglas Horton

The art of giving is perfected through anonymity.

Douglas Horton

The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity.