art

We will feel conviction about the things we create only if we keep discovering, within those creations, new reasons for wanting them to be that way.

I__ doing the absolute opposite of giving myself away. As far as I__ concerned, I__l be completely visible. If the painting sells, I__l be in Paris, hanging on a wall. If anything, I__ being selfish. It__ perfect; all the freedom of creation, with none of the fuss.

No peace is possible between the novelist and the agélaste [those who do not laugh]. Never having heard God's laughter, the agélastes are convinced that the truth is obvious, that all men necessarily think the same thing, and that they themselves are exactly what they think they are. But it is precisely in losing the certainty of truth and the unanimous agreement of others that man becomes an individual. The novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals. It is the territory where no one possesses the truth, neither Anna nor Karenin, but where everyone has the right to be understood, both Anna and Karenin.

Don__ fear the future or regret the past but celebrate the present.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. The mind that responds to the intellectual and spiritual values that lie hidden in a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, discovers a spiritual vitality that lifts it above itself, takes it out of itself, and makes it present to itself on a level of being that it did not know it could ever achieve.

His sister, in a big turquoise Angora sweater, leaned upon the wood frame of the open nursery door, anxiously looking out to see if he was really going to show, beaming and waving like a pastel colored TV Muppet when she spotted him.

You__e got sadness in you, I__e got sadness in me _ and my works of art are places where the two sadnesses can meet, and therefore both of us need to feel less sad.

Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light. Dante reserved a place in his Inferno for those who wilfully live in sadness - sullen in the sweet air, he says. Your 'honour' is all shame and timidity and compliance. Pure of stain! But the artist is the secret criminal in our midst. He is the agent of progress against authority. you are right to be a scholar. A scholar is all scruple, an artist is none. The artist must lie, cheat, deceive, be untrue to nature and contemptuous of history. I made my life into my art and it was an unqualified success. The blaze of my immolation threw its light into every corner of the land where uncounted young men sat each in his own darkness. What would I have done in Megara!? - think what I would have missed! I awoke the imagination of the century. I banged Ruskin's and Pater's heads together, and from the moral severity of one and the aesthetic soul of the other I made art a philosophy that can look the twentieth century in the eye. I had genius, brilliancy, daring, I took charge of my own myth. I dipped my staff into the comb of wild honey. I tasted forbidden sweetness and drank the stolen waters. I lived at the turning point of the world where everything was waking up new - the New Drama, the New Novel, New Journalism, New Hedonism, New Paganism, even the New Woman. Where were you when all this was happening?

The artistic life is a long and lovely suicide precisely because it involves the negation of self; as Highsmith imagined herself as her characters, so Ripley takes on the personae of others and in doing so metamorphoses himself into a 'living' work of art. A return to the 'real life' after a period of creativity resulted in a fall in spirits, an agony Highsmith felt acutely. She voiced this pain in the novel via Bernard's quotation of an excerpt from Derwatt's notebook: 'There is no depression for the artist except that caused by a return to the self'.

Your life is very different from mine. For one, you can transform into a wolf._ __ can,_ she agreed. __nd you live with a vampire and gargoyle. That__ not the typical human way, is it?

To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote __ing Lear.

All I wanted," Saina thought, "was to make someone feel something." Money can't do that. Just looking at a dollar bill did nothing to your emotions ___ou have to make money or lose money for it to make you feel anything. You can earn it, win it, lose it, save it, spend it, find it, but you can't sell it because you never really own it. On the other hand, you didn't have to possess a song or a sculpture for it to make you feel something _ you only had to experience it. So why did collectors want to collect? What feeling were they pursuing?

Timid young artists, adding parental fears to their own, often give up their sunny dreams of artistic careers, settling into the twilight world of could-have-beens and regrets.

The truth echoed in her head. On the same day she met him, he had tried to kill her. Her mate.

Art creates high energy, high vibrations, high music, high feelings, high of everything! Without art, we leave highness and we meet lowness!

Paul Virilio and I, in our different ways, share an intense interest in the changes brought about by technological innovation, by cultural and social upheavals, by natural catastrophes like earthquakes and the social and architectural responses to them. I see these extreme cases as the avant-garde of a coming normality, one that we must engage creatively now, inventing new languages, rules and methods, if we are to preserve what is essential to our humanity, that is, compassion, reason, independence of thought and action.

The special calling of the artist is to call the world to a kind of rest or remind it of its restlessness

There's a fine line between minimalism and not trying very hard.