Works Of Art Quotes - Page 33

• Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that's why I made works of art.

  Felix Gonzalez-Torres

  Art, Writing, Ideas

  Félix González-Torres, Tim Rollins, Susan Cahan, Jan Avgikos (1993). “Felix Gonzalez-Torres”, A R T Pr

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• I wouldn't build a building if it wasn't of interest to me as a potential work of art. Why should I?

  Philip Johnson

  Art, Building, Should

  "Philip Johnson: What I've Learned". Interview with John H. Richardson, www.esquire.com. February 1999.

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• To be a good artist, you have to serve the work of art and allow it to be what it is supposed to be.

  Larry Wall

  Art, Supposed To Be, Artist

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• You know, essentially when you do a play you're reinterpreting a work of art that already exists. That's not what happens with a movie.

  Sydney Pollack

  Art, Play, Happens

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• 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

  Art, Expression, Long

  Clive James (1983). “Glued to the box: television criticism from the Observer, 1979-82”, Jonathan Cape

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• Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.

  Lewis Mumford

  Art, Reality, Decay

  Lewis Mumford, Robert Wojtowicz (2008). “Mumford on Modern Art in the 1930s”, p.194, Univ of California Press

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• The true work of art is the one which the seventh wave of genius throws up the beach where the undertow of time cannot drag it back.

  Cyril Connolly

  Beach, Art, Genius

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• Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from the work of art of human character, — a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beautiful, Art, Character

  1841 Essays: First Series,'Art'.

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• Gene Wolfe has produced a work of art that can satisfy adult appetites and in which even the most fantastical elements register as poetry rather than as penny-whistle whimsy.

  Thomas M. Disch

  Art, Adults, Elements

  Thomas M. Disch (2005). “On SF”, p.141, University of Michigan Press

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• I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.

  P. D. James

  Art, Literature, Escapists

  P. D. James (2011). “Time to Be in Earnest”, p.28, Faber & Faber

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• The fact that there are so many weak, poor and boring stories and novels written and published in America has been ascribed by our rebels to the horrible squareness of our institutions, the idiocy of power, the debasement of sexual instincts, and the failure of writers to be alienated enough. The poems and novels of these same rebellious spirits, and their theoretical statements, are grimy and gritty and very boring too, besides being nonsensical, and it is evident by now that polymorphous sexuality and vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art either.

  Saul Bellow

  Art, America, Poetry

  Saul Bellow (2015). “There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction”, p.149, Penguin

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• The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.

  Bernard Berenson

  Art, Helping, Justification

  Bernard Berenson (1958). “Essays in Appreciation”

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• For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

  Joyce Cary

  Art, Hard Work, Essentials

  Joyce Cary (1961). “Art and reality: ways of the creative process”

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• Some of our most powerful works of art have been produced by older Americans-by hands that have engaged in years of hard work, eyes that have witnessed decades of change, and hearts that have felt a lifetime of emotions. Our whole society benefits when older Americans use their talents and experiences to become involved in the arts as creators, teachers, mentors, volunteers, and audiences.

  Hillary Clinton

  Teacher, Art, Powerful

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• No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.

  Paul Valery

  Art, Abandoned, Art Is

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• Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Art, Transgression, Majors

  E.L. Doctorow (2011). “Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution:: Selected Essays, 1977-1992”, p.41, Random House

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• The work of art is the exaggeration of an idea.

  Andre Gide

  Art, Ideas, Exaggeration

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• Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Art, Loneliness, Criticism

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• Fairly early in my career, I had a passion for wine just as a consumer, and I started to learn about the whole process, starting with a piece of raw ground, and ending up with a work of art in a bottle.

  Drew Bledsoe

  Art, Passion, Wine

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• I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Understanding, Spheres

  Oscar Wilde, Nicholas Frankel (2011). “The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition”, p.22, Harvard University Press

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• it is possible to study fashion the way one can study a work of art, so that it reflects significantly upon the issues and conflicts of its own day.

  Kim Chernin

  Fashion, Art, Issues

  Kim Chernin (1982). “The obsession: reflections on the tyranny of slenderness”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Nothing compares to pizza, and you discover and rediscover it when you are much too old, and you have got too much cholesterol and triglycerides...A collector is someone who is ready to devour the work of art that he wants to possess at all costs.

  Augusto De Luca

  Art, Cost, Want

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• Each good thought that you have encouraged and nourished is your life's true work of art.

  Sri Chinmoy

  Motivational, Art, Good Thoughts

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• A hen's egg is, quite simply, a work of art, a masterpiece of design and construction with, it has to be said, brilliant packaging!

  Delia Smith

  Art, Food, Eggs

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• Poetry is not an end in itself but in the service of life; of what use are poems, or any other works of art, unless to enable human lives to be lived with insight of a deeper kind, with more sensitive feelings, more intense sense of the beautiful, with deeper understanding?

  Kathleen Raine

  Beautiful, Art, Understanding

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