art

We have the power to shape our lives, by the way we think. Only that to have a progressive life, we must train ourselves into thinking in a certain way.

My words, my writing, my actions__hese have never been for myself alone, either directly or indirectly. There is no such thing as an artist who creates art only for himself. That is masturbation.

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

The measure of a work of art is how much art it has in it, not how much __elevance_. Relevant to whom? Relevant to what? Nothing is more ephemeral than a hot topic.

There are some people about whom it is difficult to say anything which would describe them immediately and fully in their most typical and characteristic aspects; these are the people who are usually called "ordinary" and accounted as "the majority," and who actually do make up the great majority of society. In their novels and stories writers most often try to choose and present vividly and artistically social types which are extremely seldom encountered in real life, and which are nevertheless more real than real life itself. Podkolyosin, viewed as a type, in perhaps exaggerated, but he is hardly unknown. How many clever people having learned from Gogol about Podkolyosin at once discover that great numbers of their friends bear a terrific resemblance to Podkolyosin. They knew before Gogol that their friends were like Podkolyosin, except they did not know yet that that was their name...Nevertheless the question remains before us: what is the novelist to do with the absolutely "ordinary" people, and how can he present them to readers so that they are at all interesting? To leave them out of a story completely is not possible, because ordinary people are at every moment, by and large, the necessary links in the chain of human affairs; leaving them out, therefore, means to destroy credibility. To fill a novel entirely with types or, simply for the sake of interest, strange and unheard-of people, would be improbable and most likely not even interesting. In our opinion the writer must try to find interesting and informative touches even among commonplace people. When, for example, the very nature of certain ordinary persons consists precisely of their perpetual and unvarying ordinariness, or, better still, when in spite of their most strenuous efforts to life themselves out of the rut of ordinariness and routine, then such persons acquire a certain character of their own-the typical character of mediocrity which refuses to remain what it is and desires at all costs to become original and independent, without having the slightest capacity for independence.

Reagan's failure to become a truly great movie star has been ascribed to project menace, sexuality, or even moral ambiguity.

Tis true what Hemingway says--if we're lucky enough to live our dreams in youth, as Ernest Hemingway did in 1920's Paris and I did with the Beat poets, then youth's dreams become a moveable feast you take wherever you go--youthful love remains the repast plentiful; exquisite, substantive and good. You can live on happy memories. Eat of them forever.

I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise.

You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne's vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn't care about masterpieces, or even good paintings... but about what is beyond all painting, all art.

The principle of art is to pause, not bypass. The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke. This requires a moment of pause--a contract with yourself through the object you look at or the page you read. In that moment of pause, I think life expands. And really the purpose of art--for me, of fiction--is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have. That is the moment of finding something which you have not known about yourself, or your environment, about others and about life.

LatelyI__e been dreaming about youAbout usSharing our secretsTalking, even if we arguedKept talking, till we sleptMaybe I woke upOn the wrong side of bedMaybe I thought about youJust a little too much

If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.

I grow weary of the loveThat lasts for a nightWhen it should be thereThe next sunrise

It__ a powerful moment, when you discover a vocabulary exists for something you__ thought incommunicably unique. Personally, I felt it reading Joseph Conrad__ __ord Jim._ I have friends who__e found themselves described in everything from science fiction to detective novels. This self-recognition through others is not simply a by-product of art _ it__ the whole point.

Get thee to the novel! - the novel, that word-woven submarine, piloted by intimation and intuition, that will dive you to the deeps of the heart's maelstrom.

My heart was full and uplifted; it seemed that in my soul the question arose whether such things as Art, literature, science encompassed and completed life or whether there was still something in the distance which encompassed it even more completely and filled it with a far greater happiness.

When my words are concealedWith lies and disguises, truth and beyondInsecurities in the veil of trustBetrayal in bounds of liesIt__ just the charm of words darlingGiving the illusion of happiness inside misery

You can't memorize poetry and stay a fake. Sooner or later, you start to understand what these poets are saying, and it makes you feel life has something quite special, with certain layers of meaning to it.