Art

A great artist is always before his time or behind it.

Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works... J. R. R.

As for everything else, so for mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained.

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. J. R. R.

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

If you cannot teach me to fly, teach me to sing.

Opera does not call so much for an imaginative ear as for an imaginative eye, an eye which can see beyond little absurdities toward great truths.

Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage.

The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting.

The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art.

When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder

 

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

 

They carried him 2 not to bury him: They carried him down to crown him…. The poet flourished here, disheveled, Who would not bow before votive lamps But to the common spade.

 

One-woman waterfall, she wears Her slow descent like a long cape And pausing, on the final stair Collects her motions into shape.

 

A poem should not mean But be.

 

This thing you see, a bright-colored deceit, displaying all the many charms of art, with false syllogisms of tint and hue is a cunning deception of the eye…

O reverend Chaucere, rose of rethoris all, As in oure tong ane flour imperiall, That raise in Britane evir, quho redis rycht, Thou beris of makaris the triumph riall. 3

 

It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, Ihave had my vision.

[ Of James Joyce’s Ulysses:] Never did I readsuch tosh. As for the first 2 chapters we willlet them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th—merelythe scratching of pimples on the body of thebootboy at Claridges.

All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well—how very shortsighted! . . . I had gotten it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintingsand other works exist only to illustrate the text .

I don’t want realism. I want magic!

Mrs. Stone found herself thinking that surely such beauty was a world of its own whose anarchy had a sort of godly license.

You have Van Gogh’s ear for music.