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Category: Art and Culture

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1. "Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry"


2. "Great artists have no country."

Alfred de Musset

Quotations about: Patriotism


3. "Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns."

Willem De Kooning

Quotations about: Various


4. "The cure for writer's cramp is writer's block."

Inigo DeLeon


5. "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


6. "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"

Quotations about: Talent and Genius


7. "To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination."

George Jean Nathan

Quotations about: Manners and Ethics


8. "Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal."

Lionel Trilling

Quotations about: Manners and Ethics


9. "Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them."

Samuel Butler, "Notebooks"

Quotations about: Education



10. "A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again."

Carl Van Doren


11. "Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other."

Neal Cassady


12. "Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises."

Günther Grass

Quotations about: Life and Death


13. "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


14. "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"

Quotations about: History and Nations


15. "Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one. "

Salman Rushdie


16. "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

Quotations about: Authority, Government -:- Politics and Diplomacy


17. "Writing is turning one's worst moments into money."

J.P. Donleavy

Quotations about: Richness and Money


18. "Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state."

Cesare Pavese, "The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935-1950"

Quotations about: Richness and Money


19. "Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem."

Lindsay Anderson

Quotations about: Question and Problem


20. "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

Quotations about: Reality and Imagination


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21. "Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."

E. L. Doctorow

Quotations about: Various


22. "There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk."

Charles Dickens, "Nicholas Nickleby"


23. "Make them laugh, make them cry, and back to laughter. What do people go to the theatre for? An emotional exercise."

Pablo Picasso


24. "Why do writers write? Because it isn't there."

Thomas Berger

Quotations about: Reality and Imagination


25. "The spirit of poetry combines the profundity of the philosopher and the child’s delight in bright pictures."

Franz Grillparzer, "Notebooks and Diaries"


26. "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


27. "Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance."

Françoise Sagan, "A Certain Smile"

Quotations about: Various


28. "Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry"

Quotations about: Happiness


29. "Literature is analysis after the event."

Doris Lessing


30. "Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud. "

W.H. Auden

Quotations about: Success and Fame


31. "A literary woman’s best critic is her husband."

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, "Chapters from a Life"

Quotations about: Marriage



32. "Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs."

Christopher Hampton


33. "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"

Quotations about: Human -:- Education


34. "Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors."

Jose Ortega y Gasset, "The Dehumanization of Art"


35. "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

Quotations about: Manners and Ethics


36. "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"

Quotations about: Trust


37. "Reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man."

Francis Bacon, "Essays"

Quotations about: Human


38. "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"


39. "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


40. "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"

Quotations about: Politics and Diplomacy


41. "Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing."

Thomas Henry Huxley, "Aphorisms and Reflections"

Quotations about: Science and Technology


42. "Wherever art appears, life disappears."

Francis Picabia

Quotations about: Life and Death



43. "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


44. "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"

Quotations about: Truth and Falsity


45. "Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book."

Edward Gibbon


46. "Memory, workmaid and mother of the Muses."

Aeschylus, "Prometheus Bound"

Quotations about: Memory


47. "Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."

Frank Zappa, "The Real Frank Zappa Book"

Quotations about: Time and Passing


48. "Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know."

Joseph Roux, "Meditations of a Parish Priest"

Quotations about: Science and Technology


49. "Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes."

Joseph Roux, "Meditations of a Parish Priest"


50. "A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep."

Salman Rushdie

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