art Quotes

Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.

I have about a dozen cassettes lying about which I use in random order. Very often, I pick up a cassette to dictate a letter, and I find my voice coming back at me with the lines of plays three years old.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

Music is either sacred or secular. The sacred agrees with its dignity, and here has its greatest effect on life, an effect that remains the same through all ages and epochs. Secular music should be cheerful throughout.

Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.

A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.

I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

Everything is allowable in literature, but what is not allowable in criticism is objection on the grounds of probability.