Art
Allowing the arts to become the sole property of big business is just as bad as turning them over to academia. If anything, it's worse.
Great art should be seen as such prior to the critic telling us so.
Without comedy, tragedy would not be possible; without tragedy, comedy would not be possible.
Art is often all there is between us and despair. But it's enough.
Art shows the way--or should.
Talent not in some way squandered is a true rarity.
It is true that art imitates life--but good art will cause life to imitate it.
We love art because we love life. Art means life--or should. And "life"? All that we can experience. Maybe even death. An embrace is one thing; I would flee from nothing.
All art is escapist.
The hero need not be likable or consistent or even right. That's God's job.
The committed love or literature condemns herself to the prerilous navigation of a sea of contradictions.
Great American Novel: Death and Texas.
Visionaries are only admired in retrospect.
All I have to say about Columbine: (1) the only thing more horrifying than such events is the general irrational alarmist hysteria that usually follows; and (2) few things make me more nervous than when politicians start talking about art.
The problem with the humanities, with the intellectual life spent in the study of them: It becomes all-too easy to come to view the natural, nonhuman world as mere background, a stage upon which the "important" things happen. And once this happens, all sorts of affronts to nature become possible, all manner of political and ideological fantasies become feasible.
Good writing is good writing. Period. All our current classifications--"nature writing", "crime fiction"--are disingenuous. We are writers all! Or nothing.
Art: saying clearly what most sense but will not express.
Being an artist implies an essential instability.
Art may scrupulously mirror life, art may satirize life, but art is not life. The experiential realm can only be ignored--eventually--at the expense of the art.
The future is never what one thinks it will be. The future is more now than some science-fiction fantasy. Science-fiction writers specialize in plausible lies.
Artists--real artists--are doomed from the start--damned, really. But it's a necessary damnation, and they can love it and cling tightly to it or hate it and scream and rail against it--they just better not successfully escape it.
