ART

Everyone knows that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes you realize the truth.
- Pablo Picasso

The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist.
- Ananda Coomraswamy (1877-1947), Indian writer. Transformation of Nature in Art.

I took the pieces you threw away
And put them together by night and day
Washed by the rain
Dried by the sun
A million pieces all in one.
- "Poem for the Garden" by visionary artist Howard Finster

Anyone can do anything with a million dollars - look at Disney. But it takes more than money to make something out of nothing, and look at the fun I have doing it.
- Tressa "Gramdma" Prisbrey, creator of Bottle Village

Art does not lie down on the bed that is made for it; it runs away as soon as one says its name... Its best moments are when it forgets what it is called.
- Jean Dubuffet

For heights & depths no words can reach, music is the soul's own speech.
- Anita Robertson

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
- Victor Hugo

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
- Herman Melville

I don’t think I handle the notes much differently from other pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, there is where the artistry lies!!
- Artur Schnabel, pianist

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting - the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.
- Saul Bellow, writer, The Adventures of Augie Marsh

There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.
- E. H. Gombrich, art critic

A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can only be a footnote.
- Evgeny Yevtushenko

How glorious it is -- and also how painful -- to be an exception.
- Alfred de Musset

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.
- Leo Rosten

The man who has no inner life is a slave to his surroundings.
- Henri-Frederic Amiel

I dream my painting and then I paint my dreams.
- Vincent Van Gogh

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.
- Oscar Wilde

There's a series of lessons that Paul Klee, the painter, taught. One of them describes the artist, whether a musician, painter, or mathematician, as the trunk of a tree. And the leaves are the work. But the thing that's feeding you is something underground. It's the roots. And that's something you can't see and you wouldn't necessarily know was there.
- found on the internet

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.
- Leo Rosten

If the paintings are too large, cut them in half!
- Frank Lloyd Wright, upon being asked about the low ceilings of the Guggenheim Museum.

There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.
- Charlie Chaplin

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.
- Marcel Proust

Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
- Jose Ortega Y Gasset, Spanish essayist

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
- Northrop Frye, Canadian literary critic.

Art is science made clear.
- Jean Cocteau, French author

Fan on chatline: Who do you see as the driving forces, creatively, behind music today?
Michael Stipe: The owner of Seagram's.

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