Art Quotes - Page 818

The Japanese are virtuosos. They make just the little accent that makes all the difference. So much there is so beautiful - just a shop window display is a work of art. Just the way they make all kinds of things out of bamboo that are so ingenious. Just the way this little bamboo drain or latch is so beautiful. The masonry around the streams to hold the bank are beautiful - and not all one kind and not just cement.

Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths.

There could have never been two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.

It takes a long time for a man to look like his portrait.

You are made of Love, and this Earth is rich with opportunities to Love. Love is all around you.

If we're all going to hell in a handbasket, we might as well make it a party on the way down

I think being an artist is having the courage to be original. Many great artists, including Picasso, have all been influenced by the great master paintings... And then finally, they leap, they take off... they become themselves. Then it looks like they just came out of nowhere. Just like 'Pow!'

The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of government.

The most dangerous men on earth are those who are afraid they are wimps

Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party.

Inspiration can hit you in the head at any time in any context. It could happen in a conversation. Talking to someone at a party, you can get an idea. But you've got to remember those inspirations.

As there are silent depths in the ocean which the fiercest storm cannot reach, so there are silent, holy depths of the hearts of people which the storm of sin and sorrow can never disturb. To reach this silence and to live consciously in it is peace.

A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

Criticism will need an injection of humility that is, a recognition of its role as ancillary to the arts, needed only occasionally in a temporary capacity. Since the critic exists only for introducing and explaining, he must be readily intelligible; he has no special vocabulary: criticism is in no way a science or a system.

Wiser, never wise. Smarter, never smart.

If the KKK was smart enough, they would've created gangsta rap because it's such a caricature of black culture and black masculinity.

The meek shall inherit the earth. They won't have the nerve to refuse it.

Martial arts is not for hurting people, it's for protecting people.

The only person who is hurt by jealousy is you... Eliminate that word from your life... it may not make you unsuccessful selling your art, but it will destroy your happiness.

Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet's life (and any sudden personal contact, whether in the bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) the poet loses his or her balance for a moment, slips into being what he or she is, uses his or her poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead person.

The work of your heart, the work of taking time, to listen, to help, is also your gift to the whole of the world

She talks with a broken heart - Her voice lutes brokenly like a heart lost, musically too, like in a lost grove, it's almost too much to bear sometimes like some fantastic futuristic Jerry Southern singer in a nightclub who steps up to the mike in the spotlight in Las Vegas but doesn't even have to sing, just talk, to make men sigh and women wonder I guess.

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

All too often the Democratic Party has taken the black vote for granted, and all too often the Republican Party has written it off.