All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.
Thomas Henry Huxley
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1. "The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel."
James Thurber, "Lanterns and Lances"
2. "The literature of women's lives is a tradition of escapees, women who have lived to tell the tale."
Phyllis Rose, "Women's Lives"
Other categories: Woman and Man
3. "Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink."
Franz Grillparzer, "Poems"
4. "Art compares to nature like wine to the grape."
Franz Grillparzer, "Notebooks and Diaries"
Other categories: Nature and Animals
5. "Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."
Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry"
6. "Great artists have no country."
Alfred de Musset
Other categories: Patriotism
7. "Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns."
Willem De Kooning
Other categories: Various
8. "The cure for writer's cramp is writer's block."
Inigo DeLeon
9. "Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language."
Gaston Bachelard
10. "Talent is an amalgam of high sensitivity; easy vulnerability; high sensory equipment (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting intensely); a vivid imagination as well as a grip on reality; the desire to communicate one's own experience and sensations, to make one's self heard and seen."
Uta Hagen, "Respect for Acting"
Other categories: Talent and Genius
11. "To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination."
George Jean Nathan
Other categories: Manners and Ethics
12. "Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal."
Lionel Trilling
Other categories: Manners and Ethics
13. "Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them."
Samuel Butler, "Notebooks"
Other categories: Education
14. "A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again."
Carl Van Doren
15. "Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other."
Neal Cassady
16. "Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises."
Günther Grass
Other categories: Life and Death
17. "There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted."
Henri Matisse
18. "Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts--the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art."
John Ruskin, "St. Mark's Rest"
Other categories: History and Nations
19. "Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one. "
Salman Rushdie
20. "Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory."
Salman Rushdie
Other categories: Authority, Government -:- Politics and Diplomacy
21. "Writing is turning one's worst moments into money."
J.P. Donleavy
Other categories: Richness and Money
22. "Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state."
Cesare Pavese, "The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935-1950"
Other categories: Richness and Money
23. "Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem."
Lindsay Anderson
Other categories: Question and Problem
24. "The function of the actor is to make the audience imagine for the moment that real things are happening to real people."
George Bernard Shaw
Other categories: Reality and Imagination
25. "Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."
E. L. Doctorow
Other categories: Various
26. "There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk."
Charles Dickens, "Nicholas Nickleby"
27. "Make them laugh, make them cry, and back to laughter. What do people go to the theatre for? An emotional exercise."
Pablo Picasso
28. "Why do writers write? Because it isn't there."
Thomas Berger
Other categories: Reality and Imagination
29. "The spirit of poetry combines the profundity of the philosopher and the child’s delight in bright pictures."
Franz Grillparzer, "Notebooks and Diaries"
30. "A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return."
Salman Rushdie
31. "Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance."
Françoise Sagan, "A Certain Smile"
Other categories: Various
32. "Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."
Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry"
Other categories: Happiness
33. "Literature is analysis after the event."
Doris Lessing
34. "Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud. "
W.H. Auden
Other categories: Success and Fame
35. "A literary woman’s best critic is her husband."
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, "Chapters from a Life"
Other categories: Marriage
36. "Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs."
Christopher Hampton
37. "The poet begins where the man ends. The man’s lot is to live his human life, the poet’s to invent what is nonexistent."
Jose Ortega y Gasset, "The Dehumanization of Art"
Other categories: Human -:- Education
38. "Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors."
Jose Ortega y Gasset, "The Dehumanization of Art"
39. "The essential function of art is moral. [...] But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind."
David Herbert Lawrence
Other categories: Manners and Ethics
40. "Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it."
David Herbert Lawrence, "The Spirit of Place"
Other categories: Trust
41. "Reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man."
Francis Bacon, "Essays"
Other categories: Human
42. "Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life."
Hannah Arendt, "Between Past and Future"
43. "There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun."
Pablo Picasso
44. "The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous... Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead."
Harold Rosenberg, "The Tradition of the New"
Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy
45. "Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing."
Thomas Henry Huxley, "Aphorisms and Reflections"
Other categories: Science and Technology
46. "Wherever art appears, life disappears."
Francis Picabia
Other categories: Life and Death
47. "The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes."
William Somerset Maugham
48. "You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you?re cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism."
William Somerset Maugham, "Cakes and Ale"
Other categories: Truth and Falsity
49. "Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book."
Edward Gibbon
50. "Memory, workmaid and mother of the Muses."
Aeschylus, "Prometheus Bound"
Other categories: Memory
2007, collected and compiled by Kazimierz Matan
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