Art Writing Quotes

Why write [about my art]? Why not just show the photographs? ~ Constantin Brancusi

The record of one's life must needs prove more interesting to him who writes it than to him who reads what has been written. ~ Elizabeth Kenny

The art of integrating the ego and the impulse for empathy in a dynamic call and response. ~ Mary Gaitskill

Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope. To say this is not to mystify the process of writing but to make an image out of the intense inner concentration the writer must have to cross the chasms of the aleatory and make them the word's own, as an explorer plants a flag. ~ Nadine Gordimer

I read a lot of social history. If I'm in an art gallery and a picture intrigues me, I immediately write down the title and I google it. I do a lot of googling and looking out for good stories. I can almost smell them sometimes. ~ Emma Donoghue

The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral ... ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Those who were still able to write beautiful melodies were kitsch composers like Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky approaches true art not in his numerous beautiful melodies, but when a melodic line is thwarted. ~ Slavoj Zizek

It is quite beneath the dignity of a person holding a Bachelor of Arts degree to engage in such a vulgar occupation as the writing of novels. ~ Fukuzawa Yukichi

The Hank Williams Syndrome: Come to Nashville, write some good songs, cut some hit records, make money, take all the drugs you can and drink all you can, become a wild man and all of a sudden die. ~ Waylon Jennings

It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. Statesmen despise publicists, painters despise art-critics, and physiologists, physicists, or mathematicians have usually similar feelings: there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. ~ G.H. Hardy

A lot of young girls don't realise how diverse the career opportunities are in games development. Many think that you need elite math skills and a vast knowledge of all things tech to work in games, and haven't thought about avenues like design, producing, art, writing or composing. ~ Rhianna Pratchett

It's gratifying to hear that from people who care about comic art. I never know what to make of it when someone writes to say, "Calvin and Hobbes is the best strip in the paper. I like it even more than Nancy." ~ Bill Watterson

Whatever may be our natural talents, the art of writing is not acquired all at once. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Domesticity is the enemy of art. I don't know if that's true. You can write good happy songs. So, I don't think it's necessarily happiness. But I think self-satisfaction is maybe the enemy. It's kind of better to think, "Tomorrow night I'm gonna sing it better." There is this forward effort. It feels to me right, it feels human. ~ Paul McCartney

Great writers are indecent people they live unfairly saving the best part for paper. good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal. if you read this after I am dead it means I made it. ~ Charles Bukowski

Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It's a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it's a normal human activity and that "everybody's creative." They're not. ~ Dave Hickey

Art is the manipulation of someone else's imagination. ~ Sol Saks

I usually write very few stage directions. I think a lot of that is a waste of time. The art of screenwriting is in its terseness, saying a lot with a little. I have no patience when I read a script where the writer describes this guy and what he's wearing and his glasses and his hair. ~ Scott Frank

The nature of making music and making art, what motivates me is that it's interesting. It's interesting to listen, to really listen to other people's point-of-view. Take in their work. Listen to the way they sing. Listen to the way they write lyrics. What they are trying to express. ~ Emily Haines

I was so used to doing art that my fingers were like albino spiders. So it was just natural for me to go to a typewriter and write poetry. ~ Patti Smith

When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules. ~ Umberto Eco

I'm very interested in the materiality of language. I wonder if, perhaps, this comes from my background in the visual arts. I was a potter for a number of years and earned a BFA in art before going to graduate school for creative writing. ~ Anna Journey

None of us older writers had gone through such a school. We are all self-taught. And, of course, there is always, in such a school, the danger of goose-stepping, uniformed ranks. But the Serapion Brethren have already, it seems to me, outgrown this danger. Each of them has his own individuality and his own handwriting. The common thing they have derived from the studio is the art of writing with ninety-proof ink, the art of eliminating everything that is superfluous, which is, perhaps, more difficult than writing. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it. ~ David Hare

Public art existed all along, but ecological art just naturally grew out of my thinking and writings in that area for years. I didn't get involved in it; I started what then became a movement. ~ Agnes Denes

Whatever art--writing, painting, sculpture, acting, dance, music, or any other--there will be frustration & travails. It's all worth it ~ Mark Rubinstein

I am really Chloe Anthony Wofford. That's who I am. I have been writing under this other person's name. I write some things now as Chloe Wofford, private things. I regret having called myself Toni Morrison when I published my first novel, The Bluest Eye. ~ Toni Morrison

There is some pressure when you are a woman doing what I do that you must support all other women unconditionally, no matter what they're projecting, or writing, or producing, or putting forth as their art. I think that's equally arbitrary and random and unfair, and kind of sexist. The secretly sexist way. I have really high standards for what I think is funny. I have that for everything, and I think it would be disingenuous of me to blanket-ly love everything a woman has produced simply to make a statement that we're all in this together. ~ Mindy Kaling

That is the mission of art - to make us pause and look at a thing a second time. ~ Oscar Wilde

Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Achilles exists only through Homer . Take away the art of writing from this world , and you will probably take away its glory . ~ Francois-Rene De Chateaubriand

I do think that there's art that is tortured, but I prefer art that has the joy in it. ~ Josh Ritter

For anyone who wants to write, and hopes some day to publish what he or she has written, it is far more important to write than it is to study about writing. ~ Edith Schaeffer

A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on. ~ Marcel Proust

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

I've always had standards about writing well. There is art in this business. There is potentially great art. ~ Gay Talese

Publishing your work is important. Even if you are giving a piece to some smaller publication for free, you will learn something about your writing. The editor will say something, friends will mention it. You will learn. ~ Tim Cahill

The difference between writing a story and simply relating past events is that a story, in order to be acceptable, must have shape and meaning. It is the old idea that art is the bringing of order out of chaos ... ~ Katherine Paterson

The recent extraordinary discovery in Photography, as applied in the operations of the mind, has reduced the art of novel-writing to the merest mechanical labour. ~ Lewis Carroll

Music, art, writing ... it's like some
magical psychic drainage. A way of
tapping into the bigger picture of all
it is to be human. ~ Lou Rhodes

Art was something that I was really interested in, probably more so than writing or anything else. ~ Robert Barry

What can a pencil do for all of us? Amazing things. It can write transcendent poetry, uplifting music, or life-changing equations; it can sketch the future, give life to untold beauty, and communicate the full-force of our love and aspirations. ~ Adam Braun

Writing, like drawing is an art, and whatever conveys the meaning is justified. ~ Maxwell Perkins

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns. ~ P.L. Travers

No art ever came out of not risking your neck. ~ Eudora Welty

Almost 70 years have gone by, and I've still got that feeling when I write ... Writing, for me, is still it. It has always been the basis of everything I do. I'm a writer who performs, not a performer who writes. I love the act of writing. It's still a thrill for me. ~ Clive James

So the aim for the press was a mixture of things: to publish under-represented writing, which is an intersection of original language, style, content, and often its author's gender. To publish it properly, in a way that makes it clear that this is art, not anthropology. To spotlight the importance of translation in making cultures less dully homogenous. ~ Deborah Smith

Don't apologize, justify or rationalize bad art or bad writing. If you do, you are part of it. ~ Walter Darby Bannard

I'd like to rid myself of writing, to surrender, to release the venom. And hopefully at some point, I'll be a happy, well-adjusted guy and I'll have no need for all that 'art.' ~ Henry Rollins

When I write I don't aim to shock people, and I'm surprised when I do. But I don't think that anything that occurs in life should be omitted from art, though the artist should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly. I set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking. ~ Tennessee Williams

Rather than feeling that every moment you've got to exert this enormous control, you can take the attitude that your job as a writer is not to control everything, but to set things in motion. ~ Stuart Dybek

I won't forget those kind of things, but I just want to write them down and look at them. It's almost like when things like music come out and you're listening to a song and you have experiences with art or phenomena that supersede your simple relationship with them as just a piece of art. They're more than that. That's just what those quote are for me. They're big, they're important. ~ Justin Vernon

When art writing seems incomprehensible, chances are it is. ~ Walter Darby Bannard

Writing for children is an art in itself, and a most interesting one. ~ Enid Blyton

I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art. ~ P.D. James

Even losing you (a joking voice, a gesture/ I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident/ the art of losing's not too hard to master/ though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. ~ Elizabeth Bishop

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil. ~ Edward Dahlberg

The art and act of writing - speaking just for myself - involves getting your proverbial ass in the proverbial chair. ~ Jerry Stahl

Lou Tyrrell has created a theatre that is a safe haven for playwrights, a birthing center for new American writing. Arts Garage has created a vital, enthusiastic audience for theatre, music, painting and sculpture in Delray Beach. ~ Israel Horovitz

Heartbreak allows us to also experience joy and love but you have to walk through heartbreak to even know what joy is. Heartbreak is a constant and it is even necessary. It allows us the opportunity of introspection and exploration. Those processes are what is necessary to write and engage in the arts. ~ Sandra Cisneros

This recognition of the truth we get in the artist's work comes to us as a revelation of new truth. I want to be clear about that. I am not referring to the sort of patronizing recognition we give a writer by nodding our heads and observing, "Yes, yes, very good, very true - that's just what I'm always saying." I mean the recognition of a truth that tells us something about ourselves that we had not been always saying, something that puts a new knowledge of ourselves withint our grasp. It is new, startling, and perhaps shattering, and yet it comes to us with a sense of familiarity. We did not know it before, but the moment the poet has shown it to us, we know that, somehow or other, we had always really known it. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

It's possible I am the only art critic that a lot of people read. And maybe Robert Hughes, if he's still writing. ~ Peter Schjeldahl

Writing can be bad and still be part of something good. That 'art' is really 'artifact,' Exhibit A, Exhibit B, of something else: a person's whole experience and life. And that always there's the chance that this will fail. That things will not work out. ~ Chris Kraus

Herein is the explanation of the analogies, which exist in all the arts. They are the re-appearance of one mind, working in many materials to many temporary ends. Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakspeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it. Painting was called "silent poetry," and poetry "speaking painting." The laws of each art are convertible into the laws of every other. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The trouble with science fiction is that you can write about everything: time, space, all the future, all the past, all of the universe, any kind of creature imaginable. That's too big. It provides no focus for the artist. An artist needs, in order to function, some narrowing of focus. Usually, in the history of art, the narrower the focus in which the artist is forced to work, the greater the art. ~ Philip J. Klass

You know, I feel like my job is to write a book. Then filmmakers come and they make a movie. And they're two really different art forms. ~ Ayelet Waldman

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love. ~ Raymond Chandler

A novel is no different than graffiti in a bathroom stall, it's just more pretentious. ~ Christy Leigh Stewart

USURY: Everybody's looking for the job in which you never have to pay anyone their pound of flesh. Self-employed nirvana. A lot of artists like to think of themselves as uncompromising; a lot of management consultants won't tell you what they do until they've sunk five pints. I don't think anybody should give themselves air just because they don't have to hand over a pound of flesh every day at 5pm, and I don't think anyone should beat themselves with broken glass because they do. If you're an artist, well, good for you. Thank your lucky stars every evening and dance in the garden with the fairies. But don't fool yourself that you occupy some kind of higher moral ground. You have to work for that. Writing a few lines, painting a pretty picture - that just won't do it. ~ Zadie Smith

Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable ~ Per Brinch Hansen

People get inspired to write, paint, draw, sing, sculpt, dance in many different ways. And there are many types of art. But the one thing that they all have in common is that they are all a sort of magic. Sometimes the magic flows from one's fingers, other times it is transferred to the person who experiences the result. Magic has always worked in mysterious ways. ~ Nnedi Okorafor

I listen to music all the time. I write while listening to music. And I tell myself that the music nourishes the art forms that I do master and domesticate, and have authority over. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Unpraised, I find it hard to start writing in the morning; but the dejection lasts only 30 minutes, and once I start I forget all about it. One should aim, seriously, at disregarding ups and downs; a compliment here, a silence there;[ ... ] the central fact remains stable, which is the fact of my own pleasure in the art. ~ Virginia Woolf

Music, art, writing - it gives us a sense of who we are, a sense of our history, a sense of our future and it should provide some kind of comfort. It's not just entertainment for entertainment's sake, it's an investment. ~ Sheryl Crow

Whenever I listen to an artist or an art historian I'm struck by how much they see and how much they know--and how much I don't.

Good art writing should therefore do at least two things. It should teach us how to look: at art, architecture, sculpture, photography and all the other visual components of our daily landscape. And it should give us the information we need to understand what we're looking at. ~ William Zinsser

Writing is the one art form that really should allow you to hang yourself. ~ Peter Sotos

Writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult to learn. ~ Jacques Barzun

The great art in writing advertisements is the finding out of a proper method to catch the reader's eye; without which, a good thing may pass over unobserved, or lost among commissions of bankrupt. ~ Joseph Addison

Making of poetry, music, dance and art as culture-making in the service of nation-making. You can find writings that make that purpose for art quite explicit. ~ Mark McMorris

Content, it dreams awake, and spins the fabric of tales. There is really nothing to be done with such imagery except to use it: in writing, in art. ~ Patricia A. McKillip

There are very few good writers about art, and you either get art-fashion writing with trendy views or you get very traditional writing. Occasionally, you get people who can write in an interesting way. Really, I think in a sense art writing needs to be renewed as well. It's in a pretty bad condition. ~ Marc Quinn

In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music. ~ Renzo Piano

Write for the love of your art. Someplace down the road, the money, the fame, they'll come, but by that time you won't be thinking in terms of money or fame. ~ James Lee Burke

In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about. ~ Ray Bradbury

The thing we often forget to talk about, or perhaps we take for granted, is our country's dazzling beauty. Our natural environment is so much a part of Australia's art, writing, music and culture, both indigenous and non indigenous. ~ Quentin Bryce

Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling. ~ William Bernbach

What is Camille Paglia doing, writing that an actress as gifted as Anne Heche has the mental depth of a pancake? How many pancake brains could do what Heche did with David Mamet's dialogue in Wag the Dog? No doubt Heche has been stuck with a few bad gigs, but Paglia, of all people, must be well aware that being an actress is not the same safe ride as being the tenured university professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. ~ Clive James

Very few people can write in a crowd. This is a very solitary occupation. I have known people more talented than me who never made it. And the primary reason was always that they couldn't stand to be alone for several hours a day. Any writer worth anything has mastered the art. The art of solitude. ~ Tom Robbins

The man who speaks and writes about art should refrain from censuring or pontificating. He will thus avoid doing anything foolish, for in the presence of primordial depth all art is but dream and nature. ~ Hans Arp

We have more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one. There is, indeed, a certain low and moderate sort of poetry, that a man may well enough judge by certain rules of art; but the true, supreme, and divine poesy is equally above all rules and reason. And whoever discerns the beauty of it with the most assured and most steady sight sees no more than the quick reflection of a flash of lightning. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Writing is a craft not an art. ~ William Zinsser

Crossing out is an art that is, perhaps, even more difficult than writing. It requires the sharpest eye to decide what is superfluous and must be removed. And it requires ruthlessness toward yourself
the greatest ruthlessness and self-sacrifice. You must know how to sacrifice parts in the name of the whole. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

I have some art, but I am a hobbyist. I would not consider myself an expert but in the course of writing this novel I became very familiar with the various movements in American Modern Art from 1900 onwards. ~ Nicholas Sparks

I think writing letters is a lost art, but nowadays it's something that means even more, because it's so easy to communicate in so many different ways. But I find a love letter can even be a little post-it note stuck in your pocket, with a sentence or a few words. ~ Hilary Swank

Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time. ~ Kathryn Bigelow

Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature. ~ O. Henry

I don't want to see any art-writing gobbledygook or overblown words in an essay about me. If a smaller, simpler word will do - use it. ~ Doris McCarthy

Art and commerce are not irreconciliable, they are inextricably intertwined. ~ Nicholas Meyer

Storytelling is the art of unfolding knowledge in a way that makes each piece contribute to a larger truth. ~ Philip Gerard

I cannot understand why some people try to write a history of photography that is separated from the history of modern art. ~ Jean-Francois Chevrier