Art

The Oklahoma Ligno and Lithograph Co Weeps at a nude by Michael Angelo.

 

But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.

 

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don’t make it of wood, you must make it of words.

A poet on Pegasus, reciting his own verses, is hardly more to be dreaded than a mounted specialist.

An artist who works in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man who moulds his thought in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling.

The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.

That which probably hears more stupidities than anything else in the world is a painting in a museum.

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.

Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority.

[I]t is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

A novel is based on evidence, + or -x, the unknown quantity being the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it entirely.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

Fashion is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms and social intercourse.

Although the novel exercises the rights of a created object, criticism has not those rights, and too many little mansions in English fiction have been acclaimed to their own detriment as important edifices.

The art of creation / is older than the art of killing.

A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist.

[Pjeople in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed.

Art is the flower of life and, as seed, it gives back life.

So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done.

Friendship is not necessary, like philosophy, like art....

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I E. M.

The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author.

Art must be parochial in the beginning to be cosmopolitan in the end.

Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion. Art is the accomplice of love.