A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
—Charles Baudelaire, 1852Quotes
All art is a revolt against man’s fate.
—André Malraux, 1951The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.
—Lester Bangs, 1971Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.
—Flannery O’Connor, 1964Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
—W.H. Auden, c. 1940To 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. 1975Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.
—G.C. Lichtenberg, c. 1780If 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, 1945If we pretend to respect the artist at all, we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.
—Henry James, 1884Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it “the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of “artist.”
—Edgar Allan Poe, 1849Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1928