artists Quotes

“This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.”

“The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

“A part of her wanted to study Mia ...to understand why...she did what she did.”

“...the thing about portraits is, you need to show people the way they want to be seen. And I prefer to show people as I see them.”

“She had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing.”

“The weird thing is, these are famous people. They’re sports stars, actors, artists. The men with stringy hair are musicians, I think. The really ugly ones are politicians, and someone told me the fatties are mostly comedians.”

“The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be.”

“The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and storytellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.”

“That building, for example, do I like it or not? Is that in my opinion a good book or a bad? Indeed my aunt’s legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration, a view of the open sky.”

“McHarg, it is true, was a great man, a man famous throughout the world, a man who had now attained the highest pinnacle of success to which a writer could aspire. But on just this account his disillusionment and disappointment must have been so much the greater and the more crushing.”

“An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.”

“It was a disappointment that all men know —the artist most of all. The disappointment of reaching for the flower and having it fade the moment your fingers touch it.”

“Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?”

“An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms. ”

“The collection of expatriate artists who gathered in Paris following the Great War was a diverse group, representing various backgrounds, occupations, and nationalities.”

“The left bank of the Seine River became and outpost for an entire generation of the dispossessed and disillusioned.”

“Paris, a city so perilously close to the war, became a refuge for artists throughout the 1920s.”

“Frustration, disillusionment and a profound sense of loss came to characterize the war-weary survivors and influenced their artistic productions.”

“Prohibition had become the law of the land, yet organized crime and the political machine appeared to walk in lock step. Conservative values dictated the status quo, censoring artistic productions and regulating personal conduct.”

“The purpose of the salon was partly to entertain and partly to educate the guests. By sharing ideas and debating philosophical points, artists found new inspiration for their work.”

“The war was undoubtedly the most profound and inescapable influence on writers in the 1920s. [...] Social, political, and aesthetic developments were percolating throughout the first part of the 20th century. In Paris, this influences coalesced in an environment that encouraged rather than stifled their growth. ”

“Modernism in art contributed to the new and challenging literary styles that were emerging in Paris and throughout Europe.[...] The new generation of writers believed that the elaborate language so typical of 19th century literature was a decadence.”

“The climate of intellectual freedom and experimentation was unlike anywhere else in the Western world.”

“The atmosphere was heady. One could find a party with relative ease on any day of the week. However, it wouldn’t be fair to say that the Lost Generation was hedonistic or irresponsible. As a whole, the various writers of the group maintained high levels of productivity and creativity throughout the turbulent twenties.”

“A return to the past, however impossible, was the yearning of many artists and intellectuals.”

“Young men who had fought for an uncertain cause had equally uncertain about their place in modern America. An exodus was, therefore, underway, led by artists and intellectuals in search of less restrictive intellectual climates.”

“No, I don’t think my conscience would let me support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.”

“It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes.”

“I’m sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer.”

“…a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”

“You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages. With an evening coat and a white tie, as you told me once, anybody, even a stock-broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized.”

“If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.”

Artists use lies to tell the truth.

“Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life—the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child — he will take endless trouble—and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less. ”

“In painting and gemmary, Fortunato, like his countrymen, was a quack–but in the matter of old wines he was sincere.”

“Do you realize this has been the greatest meeting of artists since the fifteenth century?”

“Forgive me, all of you,” the starvation artist whispered.

“He was prepared to joke with them, to tell them stories from his journeyman years, and in turn to listen to their stories, anything just so as to keep them awake, to be able to show them again and again that he had nothing edible in the cage, and that he starved in a way that not one of them could.”

″[…] he felt no limits to his ability to starve.”

“Experience had proven that for about forty days, through gradually intensified publicity, you could go on stimulating a city’s interest, but beyond that time there was no audience.”

“No one had any reason to be dissatisfied with what he had seen – no one, that is, except for the starvation artist, he alone, always.”

″[…] the starvation artist did not lose sight of reality and accepted it as perfectly natural that he, with his cage, should not be placed as, let us say, a showstopper in the center ring but installed outside at a quite easily accessible spot, close to the animal sheds.”

“Who knew where they would tuck him away if he tried to make them aware of his existence, and therefore also of the fact that, strictly speaking, he has nothing more than an obstacle on the way to the animal sheds.”

“Into the cage they put a young panther […] he did not even seem to miss his freedom; this noble body, equipped just short of bursting with everything it needed, seemed to carry its freedom around with it.”

“A true artist is an ugly man.”

“And so he lived […] in apparent glory, honored by the world, but for all that usually in a melancholy mood, which grew increasingly so because no one was able to take it seriously.”

“No one, not even the starvation artist himself knew how great his achievement really was, and his heart grew heavy.”

“There were also permanent watchmen, chosen by the public – oddly enough, usually butchers – whose job it was, always three at a time, to watch the starvation artist day and night.”

″[…] the starvation artist might respond with an outbreak of rage and, to everyone’s horror, begin to rattle the bars of his cage like an animal.”

“For he alone, and no other initiate, knew how easy it was to starve. It was the easiest thing in the world. He did not keep this fact a secret, but no one believed him.”

“I could not find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I would not have caused a sensation, and I would have stuffed myself just like you and all the others.”

“Sometimes during the hours of the watch, overcoming his weakness, he sang for as long as he could so as to show these people how unjust their suspicions were […] they were merely amazed at his dexterity in managing to eat even while singing.”

“The prospect of those visiting hours, for which the starvation artist naturally yearned, since they were the meaning of his life, also made him shudder.”

“Then again, he shrank completely into himself once more, concerned with no one.”

“Only he could also be the perfectly assured spectator of his fast.”

“I just don’t understand why an artist like you would descend to being a soldier.”

“If the creative process is so powerful, it would be natural to wonder why many artists have difficulties in their lives. It is because they do not know what they know.”

“I’ll never forget this time he wanted to do a portrait of me. He always used to say to me - serious as the devil, too - ‘Eddie, you’re not beautiful according to conventional standards, but there’s something in your face I wanna catch.’ Serious as the devil he’d say it, I mean. Well. I only posed for him this once.”

“Fear doesn’t go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.”

“What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time.”

“And remember this: What you are lies with you. If you are lazy, and accept your lot, you may live in it. If you are willing to work, you can write your name anywhere you choose, among the only ones who live beyond the grave in this world, the people who write books that help, make exquisite music, carve statues, paint pictures, and work for others.”

“Once the hideaway of artists and writers, it is now home to the odd rock icon and Hollywood movie star, and, as Theresa soon discovers, a close-knit set of expats.”

“I’ve always felt that a lot of modern art is a con, and that the most successful painters are often better salesmen and promoters than they are artists.”