The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.
—Lester Bangs, 1971Quotes
If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come.
—Raymond Chandler, 1945Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
—W.H. Auden, c. 1940Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1928If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay in solid cash—the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.
—Aldous Huxley, 1926Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.
—G.C. Lichtenberg, c. 1780We possess art lest we perish of the truth.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1887All art is a revolt against man’s fate.
—André Malraux, 1951Art imitates nature as well as it can, as a pupil follows his master; thus it is a sort of grandchild of God.
—Dante, c. 1315Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1852To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.
—George Eliot, c. 1872Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
—Frank Zappa, c. 1975I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do—that was one of my favorite things about it—and when I first did it, I felt perverse.
—Diane Arbus, c. 1950