Art

There’s a fascination frantic

Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

A wandering minstrel I—

Hugo—alas!

Books are made not like children but like pyramids … and they’re just as useless! and they stay in the desert! … Jackals piss at their foot and the bourgeois climb up on them.

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art.

Art is a jealous mistress.

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’.

In the room the women come and go

You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art.

Murder considered as one of the fine arts.

Art is vice. You don’t marry it legitimately, you rape it.

Television is for appearing on, not looking at.

Just say the lines and don’t trip over the furniture.

Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington,

Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art, as of life.

To see him act, is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.

Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, all in perspective.

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Shakespeare unlocked his heart,’ once more!

Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm … an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.