A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“A work is finished when an artist realizes his intentions.”
“A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.”
“A work is not art until enough noise has been made about it and someone rich comes along and buys it.”
“A work is perfectly finished only when nothing can be added to it and nothing taken away.”
“A work of (whatever) art can be either 'received' or 'used'. ...'Using' is inferior to 'reception' because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it ... When the art in question is literature a complication arises, for to 'receive' significant words is always, in one sense, to 'use' them, to go through and beyond them to an imagined something which is not itself verbal.”
“A work of art can be called revolutionary if, by virtue of the aesthetic transformation, it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing unfreedom and the rebelling forces, thus breaking through the mystified (and petrified) social reality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation).”
Source: Art and Liberation: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse
“A work of art can only come from the interior of man. Art is the form of the image formed upon the nerves, heart, brain and eye of man.”
“A work of art comes only from inside a human being.”
“A work of art comes out of a state of deep stillness.”
“A work of art contains its verification in itself: artificial, strained concepts do not withstand the test of being turned into images; they fall to pieces, turn out to be sickly and pale, convince no one. Works which draw on truth and present it to us in live and concentrated form grip us, compellingly involve us, and no one ever, not even ages hence, will come forth to refute them.”
“A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.”
Source: The Infinite Variety of Music
“A work of art does not need an explanation. The work has to speak for itself. The work may be subject to many interpretations, but only one was in the mind of the artist. Some artists say to make the work readable for the public is an artist’s responsibility, but I don’t agree with that. The only responsibility to be absolutely truthful to the self. My work disturbs people and nobody wants to be disturbed They are not fully aware of the effect my work has on them, but they know it is disturbing.”
“A work of art doesn’t need to provide complete answers in order to succeed. It needs only to excite us into asking questions and give us a place to think about them while we become involved in other people’s lives.”
Source: Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
“A work of art doesn't dare you to realize it. It germinates and gestates by itself.”
“A work of art doesn't exist outside the perception of the audience.”
“A work of art doesn't have to be explained.”
“A work of art doesn't have to be explained. If you do not have any feeling about this, I cannot explain it to you. If this doesn't touch you, I have failed.”
“A work of art enters life very much like another human being - complicated, loaded with overtones and meaning, mysterious, enticing, obsessive, and beautiful. There's no way to control how it will be used, how it will be read, and that's part of the excitement of it.”
“A work of art expresses itself as a balance sheet pitting the spoken against the unspoken.”
“A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about it.”
Source: Gravity and Grace
“A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don't give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth.”
“A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.”
“A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it.”
“A work of art in paint should be beautiful and expressive as abstract colour and form and should not interest us necessarily in any 'story' outside of itself - or else it belongs to the field of illustration.”
“A work of art is a confession.”
Source: Notebooks
“A work of art is a declaration of freedom. There has never been anything so difficult for mankind to bear as freedom.”
Source: The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer
“A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.”
Source: Every Force Evolves a Form: Twenty Essays
“A work of art is a renewable source of energy.”
“A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.”
“A work of art is an act of love. Critics are crab lice.”
“A work of art is an echo chamber which repeats what people say about it.”
“A work of art is an exaggeration.”
“A work of art is essentially the internal made external, resulting from a creative process operating under the impulse of feeling, and embodying the combined product of the poet's perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. The primary source and subject matter of a poem, therefore, are the attributes and actions of the poet's own mind; or of if aspects of the external world, then these only as they are converted from fact to poetry by the feelings and operations of the poet's mind.”
“A work of art is first cloudily conceived in the mind; during the period of gestation it stands more clearly forward from these swaddling mists, puts on expressive lineaments, and becomes at length that most faultless, but also, alas! that incommunicable product of the human mind, a perfected design. On the approach to execution all is changed. The artist must now step down, don his working clothes, and become the artisan. He now resolutely commits his airy conception, his delicate Ariel, to the touch of matter; he must decide, almost in a breath, the scale, the style, the spirit, and the particularity of execution of his whole design.”
Source: R.L. Stevenson on Fiction: An Anthology of Literary and Critical Essays
“A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity.”
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
“A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. The verdict on it lies in this nature of its origin: there is no other.”
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
“A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.”
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
“A work of art is great to the extent that to encounter it is to be changed.”
“A work of art is itself an object, first of all, and so manipulation is unavoidable: it's a prerequisite. But I needed the greater objectivity of the photograph in order to correct my own way of seeing: for instance, if I draw an object from nature, I start to stylize and to change it in accordance with my personal vision and my training. But if I paint from a photograph, I can forget all the criteria that I get from these sources. I can paint against my will, as it were. And that, to me, felt like an enrichment.”
Source: Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007
“A work of art is like a person: it has more than one soul in its breast.”
“A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.”
“A work of art is not a matter of thinking beautiful thoughts or experiencing tender emotions , but of intelligence, skill, taste, proportion, knowledge, discipline and industry; especially discipline.”
Source: The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh
“A work of art is one of mystery, the one extreme magic; everything else is either arithmetic or biology.”
Source: Portraits and Observations
“A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them.”
“A work of art is only of interest, in my opinion, when it is an immediate and direct projection of what is happening in the depth of a person's being.. ..It is my belief that only in this Art Brut can we find the natural and normal processes of artistic creation in their pure and elementary state.”
“A work of art is something produced by a person, but is not that person — it is of her, but is not her. It’s a reach, really — the artist is trying to inhabit, temporarily, a more compact, distilled, efficient, wittier, more true-seeing, precise version of herself — one that she can’t replicate in so-called ‘real’ life, no matter how hard she tries. That’s why she writes: to try and briefly be more than she truly is.”
“A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.”
Source: Perseus In The Wind: A Life of Travel
“A work of art is the trace of a magnificent struggle.”
“A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.”
Source: The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde
“A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. ...Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known. ...Art is Individualism.”
Source: The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde