| Art |
| A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay "The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker"
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. ~ Virginia Woolf "A Room of One's Own" Art is the objectification of feeling, and subjectification of nature. ~ Suzanne Langer "Mind" Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is. ~ Willa Cather "The Song of the Lark" Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work. ~ Bette Davis "Mother Goddamn" Be regular and orderly in your daily affairs that you may be violent and original in your work. ~ Gustave Flaubert Breath-in experience, breath-out poetry. ~ Muriel Rukeyser Human beings do not carry civilization in their genes. All that we do carry in our genes are certain capacities--the capacity to learn to walk upright, to use our brains, to speak, to relate to our fellow men, to construct and use tools, to explore the universe, and to express that exploration in religion, in art, in science, in philosophy. ~ Margaret Mead "Human Nature Will Flower If--" I love smooth words, like gold-enameled fish Which circle slowly with a silken swish. ~ Elinor Wylie "Pretty Words" I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate. ~ Jack London If you keep your feathers well oiled the water of criticism will run off as from a duck's back. ~ Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards "The Life of Ellen H. Richards" I'll publish right or wrong. Fools are my tehme, let satire be my song. ~ George Gordon Noel Byron Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. ~ Albert Einstein In every grain of sand there is a story of the earth. ~ Rachel Carson "Holiday" Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. ~ Susan Sontag "Evergreen Review" It's splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts. ~ Gustave Flaubert Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. ~ Helen Keller "The Story of My Life" Love made me poet, And this I wit; My heart did do it, And not my wit. ~ Elizabeth Lady Tanfield "epitaph for her husband" Moments in dream and divinity last for hours, and a single sentence begets a whole book. ~ J. Robert King "Lancelot du Lethe" No other creative field is as closed to those who are not white and male as is the visual arts. After I decided to be an artist, the first thing that I had to believe was that I, a black woman, could penetrate the art scene, and that, further, I could do so without sacrificing one iota of my blackness or my femaleness or my humanity. ~ Faith Ringgold "Ms. magazine" One arrives at style one with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness. ~ Gustave Flaubert Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar. ~ Katherine Fullerton Gerould "Models and Morals" Personality is more important than beauty, but imagination is more important than both of them. ~ Laurette Taylor "Actors on Acting" So when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs, --a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary kingdom of time; a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such was the virtue of the soul out of which they came) which carry them fast and far, and infects them irrecoverably into the hearts of men. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson Stories ought not to be just little bits of fantasy that are used to wile away an idle hour; from the beginning of the human race stories have been used - by priests, by bards, by medicine men - as magic instruments of healing, of teaching, as a means of helping people come to terms with the fact that they continually have to face insoluble problems and unbearable realities. ~ Joan Aiken That's wrong thinking, to my mind, And wrong thoughts make poor poems. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning "Aurora Leigh" The artist is merely the one who goes on learning after he grows up. It he is a good learner, he will finally learn the hardest thing: how to see his own world, how to speak in his own words. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson The man who has no imagination has no wings. ~ Muhammad Ali The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand in rapt awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. ~ Albert Einstein The universe is made of stories, not atoms. ~ Muriel Rukeyser The way of art, after all, is neither to cut adrift from the emotions, the senses, the body, etc., and sail off into the void of pure meaning, nor to blind the mind's eye and wallow in irrational, amoral meaninglessness--but to keep open the tenuous, difficult, essential connections between the two extremes. To connect. To connect idea with value, sensation with intuition, cortex with cerebellum. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin "Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction" The whole purpose of literature is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world. ~ Thorton Wilder "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer's life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab. ~ Mary Roberts Rinehart "My Story" Theft is an integral part of a healthy literature. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin "Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction" There are two situations that make interesting stories: when an extraordinary person is plunged into the commonplace, and when an ordinary person gets involved in extraordinary events. ~ Sister Helen Prejean This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. ~ Dorothy Parker "Wit's End" We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print. ~ Virginia Woolf "The Common Reader" What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does--that is fill us with wonderment. ~ Gustave Flaubert Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science. ~ Albert Einstein Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room. ~ Annie Dillard "The Writing Life" Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter. ~ Jessamyn West "To See The Dream" You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. ~ Jack London I feel we're all trying to find a story, like treasure buried beneath our city, and all the feeble stories we live are patterned after that pristine story whose shape we almost know. Sometimes just after I wake or before I make love I'll think, This is the story, I'm living the story. But the world always rushes in with its clash and anguish. ~ Keith Miller "The Book of Flying" In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson "The Poet" Keep characters in propinquity long enough and a story will always develop a plot. ~ Keith Miller "The Book of Flying" The same word may be used in two poems. But in one poem it is sad and lovely and in the other flimsy. What matters are the motions of the heart beneath the hand that holds the pen. My pulse may somehow enter my pen, the ink itself is my blood, the pen an open vein on the page. ~ Keith Miller "The Book of Flying" The whole point of editing well is to have the reader exclaim not, "What a wonderfully edited book!" but rather, "What a wonderful writer!" ~ Michael Kandel The writing of poetry is a chancy business, its currency solitude and loss, its tools coffee and too much wine, its hours midnight, dawn and dusk, and unlike other trades the hours asleep are not time off. ~ Keith Miller "The Book of Flying" Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself. ~ Mark Twain Words have meaning and names have power. The universe began with a word, you know. But which came first: the word or the thought behind the word? You can't create language without thought�and you can't conceive a thought without language. So which created the other and, thus, created the universe? ~ J. Michael Strazcynski "Babylon 5 - Lorien" Yes, dreams are the seam I mine, the soil I till, the timber I fell. I am a carpenter, sauring, planing, hammering my dreams, jointing them into structures sturdy enough to bear the weight of a body, the weight of flesh. I have my tools, my notebook, my fountain pen. ~ Keith Miller "The Book of Flying" |
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