The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.

When extremists come together extreme things happen.

The aim of language…is to communicate…to impart to others the results one has obtained…As I talk, I reveal the situation…I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.

Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can’t. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not...

Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art.

Art is the truth of the imagination.

Only a free hand can draw a free line.

An artist who maintains that he has been misunderstood is almost always a bad artist who, I’m afraid to say, has been understood.

Literature matters because it is how humanity, with all its losses and joys, can become a work of art.

Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by...

For a second, I stared at the map of her veins just under the surface of her thin skin. It was like her body was trying to become diaphanous. Instead of getting harder and stronger...

…sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.

B-but, Mr Jimson, I w-want to be an artist.”Of course you do,’ I said, ‘everybody does once. But they get over it, thank God, like the measles and the chickenpox. Go home and go to...

I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light.

The human body is the best work of art.

I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.

Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.

When the artist finds himself he is lost. The fact that he has succeeded in never finding himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only lasting achievement.

All things are artificial, for nature is the art of time.

I can’t overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I’d thought about what I was doing. When I graduated from college I genuinely believed that the creative life was the...

The best of all lost arts is honesty

It is wrong to assume that art needs the spectator in order to be. The film runs on without any eyes. The spectator cannot exist without it. It insures his existence.

Does our purpose on Earth directly link to the people whom we end up meeting? Are our relationships and experiences actually the required dots that connect and then lead us to our ultimate destinies?

I wish that love could be broken down the way it breaks me down.

Art is an act of the soul, not the intellect. When we are dealing with people’s dreams – their visions, really – we are in the realm of the sacred. We are involved with forces...

When I was a child my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll be the pope.’ Instead I became a painter and wound...

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

They pay thousands and thousands for the Van Goghs and Modiglianis they’d have spat on at the time they were painted. Guffawed at. Made coarse jokes about.

Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression. Nothing else can so effectively give outward form to an inner experience. Poetry and music exist in time. Painting and architecture are...

Anywhere art visits turns into a gorgeous place!

If a painter, then, paints a picture of an ideally beautiful man, complete to the last detail, is he any the worse painter because he cannot show that such a man could really exist?

All photos speak a thousand words. This one contained a library.

Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a...

What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition— and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks...

One should not confuse creativity with whining.

The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn’t talk about it. She does her work.

I don’t think we should be trying to control how people experience art. They can see it on a screen or on a T-shirt. If you’ve got something that’s interesting, it just really doesn’t matter...

Poetry looking in the mirror sees art, and art looking in a mirror sings poetry.

Inside CriticsThe critical voices in our own heads are far more vicious than what we might hear from the outside. Our “inside critics” have intimate knowledge of us and can zero in on our weakest...

It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.

Once all the blocks were on the quad, Rowena grew obsessed with arranging them perfectly. I didn’t care at this point and busied myself texting a message to Sydney on the Love Phone, letting her...

There are two musical situations on which I think we can be confident that a blessing rests. One is where a priest or an organist, himself a man of trained and delicate taste, humbly and...

Art is the only proof we have that we told the truth.

For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world – legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier: mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars;...

Art can only progress towards its own self-annihilation.

I’m very headstrong. Once I’ve caught fire, there’s no dousing the flames—all engines full speed ahead.

The willingness to be a champion for stupid ideas is the key to greater creativity, innovation, fulfillment, inspiration, motivation and success.

For all the pain you suffered, my mama. For all the torment of your past and future years, my mama. For all the anguish this picture of pain will cause you. For the unspeakable mystery...