" They ask what
the purpose of art is. Is that how
things are? Say there were a thousand
artists and one purpose, would one
artist be having it and all the nine hundred and ninety-nine others
be missing the point?"-- John Cage




"I don't think we should insist that the poet is normal or, for
that matter, that anybody is."-- Wallace Stevens



"Poetry is indispensible--if I only knew what for."--Jean
Cocteau


"There is a mystery in the universe. But what is it?"--
Magritte


"The thing that destroys artists more rapidly and consistently
than anything else is to be unwanted...The bottom line is that to be
wanted is a nurturing thing for an artist."--Eric Fischl



"You write better with all your problems resolved. You write
better in good health. You write better without preoccupations. You
write better when you have love in your life. There is a romantic
idea that suffering and adversity are very good, very useful for the
writer. I don't agree at all."--Gabriel Garcia Marquez



"Applause is the most potent of rejuvenators, the most certain
remedy for tired blood, the one true aphrodisiac. The human organism
needs it the way a plant needs water and light, and will have it even
if it must be drawn from the organism itself."--Donal Henahan



"Daring constitutes the true measure of discipline."--Apollinaire


"All you can do as an artist--for the kind of artist I am and
that I think artists should be--is to try to radicalize your own
impulses and strip away everything that isn't you, and make
everything that is you that much stronger."--Richard Foreman



"Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable
goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers
set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature
continue to have a function."--Italo Calvino



"If you stick to your soul, it will stick to you. The world has
a way of slipping through your fingers."--G.B. Shaw



"Art is not to decorate apartments. It is an offensive and
defensive weapon against the enemy."--Picasso



The only thing that is different from one time to another is
what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing
everything."--Gertrude Stein



"This is the time. And this is the record of the time." --
Laurie Anderson.



"I recognize only one motive for the act of painting: the desire
to paint an image one would like to look at."--Magritte



"My favorite definition of fiction is Cocteau's: 'Literature is
a force of memory that we have not yet understood.'' It seems that
in a book that one finds gratifying, the writer is able to present
the reader with a memory he has already possessed but has not
comprehended."--John Cheever



"He was ruined in every way, but a man possessed of passion is
not a bankrupt in life."-- Joseph Conrad



"Make mad the guilty and appal the free
Confound the ignorant and amaze indeed
the very faculties of eyes and ears."--Hamlet



"...curiosity in its turn is insubordination in its purest
form."--Nabokov



"Beauty is dangerous in narrow times. A knife in the slender
back of the rational man, and only those who live between the layers
of these strange days can know its name and shape."--Don DeLillo



"Both their truth and their madness are accepted, for we must
never forget that an artist imposes his madness on an audience less
mad, or at least unaware of its madness."--Francois Truffaut



"I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of
contradicting myself."--Tom Stoppard



"The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for
everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for
everything."--Milan Kundera



"Some say the novel is dead. But it is not the novel. It is
they who are dead."--Marquez


When nations grow old
The Arts grow cold
And commerce settles on
Every tree.--William Blake


"However tough the peasant in his heart, every writer needs
people who believe in him, give him a shoulder to cry on, and value
what he values. If the writer doesn't get it, he might try changing
friends."--John Gardner


"People cannot be expected to put aside even the meager comfort
of financial success and critical acclaim...unless they can be shown
something better. We must support each other concretely in the quest
for artistic knowledge, in the struggle to create."--David Mamet

"A terrorist is a product of our education that says that fantasy is not real, that says aesthetics is just for artists, that says soul is only for priests, imagination is trivial or dangerous and for crazies, and that reality, what we must adapt to, is the external world, and that world is dead."
James Hillman

"...but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness."
Jacques in Shakespeare's As You Like It

"The united personality will never quite lose the painful sense of innate discord. Complete redemption from the sufferings in this world is and must remain in illusion. The goal is important only as an idea; the essential thing is the opus which leads to the goal: that is the goal of a lifetime." Jung