Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions. — Iris Murdoch
Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas! — D. H. Lawrence
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture. — Juan Ramon Jimenez
Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors. — Tristan Tzara
Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world. — Gwendolyn Brooks
Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness. — F. R. Leavis
Literature is the question minus the answer. — Roland Barthes
When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language. — James Earl Jones
Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. — Tristan Tzara
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. — Henry James
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language. — Steven Pinker
There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images. Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions. — Dana Gioia
What An Art Quotes
I believe that every human being should try to do good for someone else. There are so many different ways to do it. My art can be an instrument for helping people... What a good feeling - that I can do that with my art. — Romero Britto
One of the things my career as an artist might say to young artists is: The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best. And unless you photograph what you love, you are not going to make good art. — Sally Mann
That is what art is at the end of the day: It's an escapism that we all crave. — Lauren Jauregui
You're a work of art. Not everyone will understand you, but the ones who do, will never forget about you.
The act of creation is an attempt to enter a mysterious realm. A longing to transcend. What we create allows us to share glimpses of an inner landscape, one that is beyond our understanding. Art is our portal to the unseen world. — Rick Rubin
Only Art is Eternal Wisdom; what is not Art soon perishes. Art is the unconscious love of all things. ‘Learning’ will cease and Reality will become known when it comes to pass that every human being is an Artist. — Austin Osman Spare
Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better. — Donald Knuth
The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.
By some ardent enthusiasts Chess has been elevated into a science or an art. It is neither; but its principal characteristic seems to be - what human nature mostly delights in - a fight. — Emanuel Lasker
Black and white is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive...
Black and white is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality. — Roger Ballen
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. — Aristotle
It's not about how you are when things go well, what defines you is how you are when you fail from an obstacle. — Georges St-Pierre
Literature And Art Quotes
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't. — Jean-Luc Godard
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't. — JeanLuc Godard
An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.
If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it. — Andrew Denton
How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions? — Polly Toynbee
It is my earnest hope, and indeed the hope of all mankind, that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past... — Douglas MacArthur
There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it. — F. Sionil José
Nearly everything that defines much of our daily experiences is consummatory in nature. Yes, we consume products and services. But we also consume life experiences, religious narratives, art, literature, and ideas. — Gad Saad
Man needs music, literature, and painting - all those oases of perfection that make up art - to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life. — Fernando Botero
All art, literature, and music must be born in your heart's blood. Art is your heart's blood. — Edvard Munch
Literary Works Quotes
If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us. — Franz Kafka
The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work. — Johannes V. Jensen
The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work. — Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
The period that I could consider the most important in my literary work came about beginning with the Revolution, and in a certain way, developed as a consequence of the Revolution. But it was also a result of the counterrevolutionary coup of November 1975. — Jose Saramago
A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts - for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work. — Andrei Tarkovsky
I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don't like. No other criterion exists for me. — Anton Chekhov
Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore. — Stendhal
Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of. — Bertolt Brecht
The nearest approach to the infallible in literary judgment is represented in the colossal work of the teacher of all these three [Edmund Gosse, Edward Dowden and George Saintsbury], the greatest critic that ever lived - not an Englishman, but a Frenchman, the wonderful Sainte-Beuve. — Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
I doubt very much if a man whose main literary interests were in works by Mr. Zane Grey, admirable as they may be, is particularly equipped to be the chief executive of this country, particularly where Indian Affairs are concerned. — Dean Acheson
Literary Quotes
What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. — Joseph Pulitzer
Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world. — Samuel Johnson
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Women need to become literary "criminals," break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives. — Kathy Acker
It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience. — Robert Morgan
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name. — George Saintsbury
When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling. — Ted Rall
The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit. — Michael Moorcock
Literary Criticism Quotes
How dare anyone, parent, schoolteacher, or merely literary critic, tell me not to act colored. — Arna Bontemps
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion. — T. S. Eliot
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising. — D. H. Lawrence
The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud. — H. L. Mencken
In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. — George Orwell
Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself. — Robertson Davies
Literary criticism is generally bunk. Nonsense. Usually based on self-serving post-intellectual bullshit. — John Fante
Strict rules of evidence would destroy psychoanalysis and literary criticism. — Mason Cooley
The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements. — Paul De Man
There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic. — Anne Stevenson
Literary Love Quotes
Each time you happen to me all over again. — Edith Wharton
So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Marie Calloway has a very specific literary personality that the reader is intrigued by: she's masochistic, loves to experiment, is quickly bored and intermittently self-hating, very hip, rebellious. Figuring her out is a gripping adventure. — Edmund White
To Grandma: Once upon a time, there was a boy who flew. — Chris Colfer
Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine? Yet midwifery is the very stuff of drama. Every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain, followed by joy or sometimes remorse. A midwife is in the thick of it, she sees it all. — Jennifer Worth
I took a photo of us, mid-embrace. When I am old and alone I will remember that I once held something truly beautiful. — Joe Dunthorne
People love gossip because it's slightly removed from actuality. It's a very literary thing... You can hear a great story, and it turns out that it's largely not true. Fiction writing is like gossip. It's not malicious gossip, but it's gossip. — Lorrie Moore
To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life. — Victor Hugo
True education seeks to make men and women not only good mathematicians, proficient linguists, profound scientists, or brilliant literary lights, but also honest men and women with virtue, temperance, and brotherly love. — David O. Mckay
Visual Art Quotes
The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is cure it somehow with design. — Massimo Vignelli
I mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary. — Barbara Kruger
The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age. — Marshall McLuhan
Our one goal is to give the world a taste of peace, friendship and understanding. Through the visual arts, the art of celebration of life. — Steven Spielberg
In learning the art of storytelling by animation, I have discovered that language has an anatomy. — Walt Disney
I like photography because it is a reality medium, unlike drawing which is unreal. I like to mess with reality...to bend reality. Some of my works beg the question of is it real or not? — Storm Thorgerson
The style of ancient Egyptian art is transcendently clear, something 8-year-olds can recognize in an instant. Its consistency and codification is one of the most epic visual journeys in all art, one that lasts 30 dynasties spread over 3,000 years. — Jerry Saltz
Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves. — Julia Morgan
Don't be afraid of expressing what you really mean in your art, what you really feel. Say it visually, as strongly as you can. Push as far a reach as you can, then go all the way! — Kay WalkingStick
Artwork Quotes
I tried different techniques during my career, but I especially fell in love with painting with oil and pallette-knife. Every artwork is the result of long painting process; every canvas is born during the creative search; every painting is full of my inner world. — Leonid Afremov
They paint me as a villain, I just autograph the artwork. — Lil Wayne
Unfortunately, the general interest in art among the Japanese is very low compared to that of Western countries. I would love to be able to correct that by bringing many more pieces of interesting artwork to Japan. — Yusaku Maezawa
I began collecting artwork as a way to help young artists to promote their work as well as to increase awareness of contemporary art among the younger generation. — Yusaku Maezawa
I always see these landscapes in my dreams, and feel happy. I desperately try to transform these dreams into artwork, so that even while napping, I construct and reconstruct various images. — Yayoi Kusama
I could never live without artwork. It's a constant inspiration. — Narciso Rodriguez
I would love to be able to share my artwork with as many people as possible so that I can help spread an appreciation for art in general. — Yusaku Maezawa
The seed of your next artwork lies embedded in the imperfections of your current piece. Such imperfections are your guides - valuable, objective, non-judgmental guides to matters you need to reconsider or develop further. — David Bayles
People who have ordered my pieces to be removed should have asked themselves before if they were artworks or vandalism. — Invader
I always try to treat the book itself as the artwork. I don't want you to stop while you're reading one of my books and say, 'Oh! What a gorgeous illustration!' I want you to stop at the end of the book and say, 'This is a good book. — Chris Raschka
The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images. — Camille Paglia
The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action. — Russell Kirk
A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two. — Will Eisner
Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it — Mark Twain
Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish
Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed
himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and
has lived selflessly for the art — Seamus Heaney
San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth. — William Saroyan
One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. — Walter Pater
The delight we experience when we allow ourselves to respond to a fairy tale, the enchantment we feel, comes not from the psychological meaning of the tale (although this contributes to it) but from its literary qualities-the tale itself as a work of art. — Bruno Bettelheim
The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being. — Yevgeny Zamyatin
An essay is a work of literary art which has a minimum of one anecdote and one universal idea. — Carol Bly
Art, although produced by man's hands, is something not created by hands alone, but something which wells up from a deeper source out of our soul.....My sympathies in the literary as well as in the artistic field are drawn most strongly to those artists in whom I see most the working of the soul. — Vincent Van Gogh
Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak. — Salman Rushdie
The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same. — Clive James
I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art. — Anne Stevenson
I felt, "Oh, film is a great art because I can pull in music and visual imagery, and it has its literary aspects and drama." Film was a sort of Wagnerian synthesis of the arts, as opposed to opera, which Wagner had thought would be. That's another art form that has seen its best days. — James Toback
The beauty of the literary art, the grappling with the black church, the wrestling with one's identity in the bosom of a complicated black community that was both bulwark to the larger white society as well as a threshing ground, so to speak, to hash out the differences that black people have among ourselves. — Michael Eric Dyson
The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art. — Clement Greenberg
... if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us to break her and bullyher, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured. — Virginia Woolf
During five literary generations every enlightened person had despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. — George Orwell
In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me. — Herbert Spencer
The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among them: nevertheless, if only some come up! — Novalis
A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime. — Boris Pasternak
Norwich is a fine city. None finer. If there is another city in the United Kingdom with a school of painters named after it, a matchless modern art gallery, a university with a reputation for literary excellence which can boast Booker Prize-winning alumni, one of the grandest Romanesque cathedrals in the world, and an extraordinary new state-of-the-art library then I have yet to hear of it. — Stephen Fry
The extraordinarily facile and in literary terms long lived works tend to be about ordinary people. Even Sappho writes about the utterly insignificant . What art can do is make the extraordinary more ordinary and ordinary more extraordinary. — Robert Dessaix
Blogging has helped create an expanded awareness of the creative nonfiction genre, generally. But I suspect many bloggers continue to be unaware that they are (or have the potential to be) "literary" or "artful." — Lee Gutkind
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon. — D. H. Lawrence
The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images. — Camille Anna Paglia
I've been trying to... Having been an English literary graduate, I've been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity. — Douglas Adams
If Art relates itself to an Object, it becomes descriptive, divisionist, literary. — Robert Delaunay
I'm more interested in moving toward writing stories - thinking about the graphic novel form, and just something more long-form. I did a lot of literary translation in college. Translation is an art. But for sure writing has always been a part of how I think through my ideas. — Chitra Ganesh
The literary world is more time-traveling than the art world, and novelty is much more important in art than it is in writing. — Lynne Tillman
We lose ourselves in stories; that's the beauty of literary art. — Siri Hustvedt
I didn't start publishing literary texts until I had left Iraq. At the Academy [of Cinematic Arts] I was busy with short films. — Hassan Blasim
I've been in the art world for many years. But the sad fact is that most writers are visually prepubescent. Generally speaking, the literary world is provincial when it comes to matters of art. And it always has been. — Richard Grossman
For the grand and inescapable tradition of western literary classics confronts us with fundamental choices over our understanding of words, reading and art, as well as citizenship, civilization, faith, and the whole notion of the true, the good, and the faithful. — Os Guinness
Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in 'Deerslayer,' and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record. — Mark Twain
The visual and literary arts are of perennial interest to me, and these art forms have become more and more a part of my life; they have become companions of sorts. I cannot imagine my day to day experiences without the presence of these art forms. They're absolutely essential. — Michael Hersch
Your interviews or blog posts or whatever are less supplements to your novel than part of it. I'm not private, but I believe in literary form - I'll use my life as material for art (I don't know how not to do this) and I'll use art as a way of exploring that passage of life into art and vice versa, but that's not the same thing as thinking that any of the details of my life are interesting or relevant on their own. — Ben Lerner
In the broad spectrum of the arts, two worlds rarely overlap - the literary world and the world of rock music. — William Boyd
I don't have a very high opinion, actually, of the world of criticism - or the practice of criticism. I think I admire art criticism, criticism of painting and sculpture, far more than I do that of say films and books, literary or film criticism. But I don't much like the practice. I think there are an awful lot of bad people in it. — Tom Robbins
Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them. — Henry David Thoreau
There are in me, in literary terms, two distinct characters: one who is taken with roaring, with lyricism, with soaring aloft, with all the sonorities of phrase and summits of thought; and the other who digs and scratches for truth all he can, who is as interested in the little facts as the big ones, who would like to make you feel materially the things he reproduces. — Gustave Flaubert
In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs. — Northrop Frye
In Conclusion
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