Paul Scofield Quotes

People go to see beautiful paintings to see how much they cost. Wow. The practical value is that it shows you what the human spirit can do.

The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.

Money is something that can be measured; art is not. It's all subjective.

The realistic value of a work is completely independent of its properties in terms of content.

Art is often valuable precisely because it isn't a sensible way to make money.

Anything you can settle with money is cheap.

Art is something that nobody laughs at and nobody makes any money out of is the attitude, which I would dispute.

Everything we make in life, eventually, is sold for a dollar or a penny or given away.

Art is not about objects of high monetary exchange. It's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time.

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.

The genuine music lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it.

The only thing an artist is useful for, and the only reason why we don't just line 'em up against the wall and shoot them, is because, at their best, they're the reflection of our lives, that most regular people can't even afford to think about.

I don't think [price] reflects if the work is good or bad.A good artist shouldn't be nervous about that.

A work of art is worth what someone will pay for it.

Art should never try to be popular.

If it's fifty years from now and it still has the same value, that's a movie.

What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about?

Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.

The final evaluation of a play has nothing to do with immediate audience or critical response.

Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is great matter.

The public buys "art" - but the word is drained of its meaning.

I think if it doesn't do what I say, if it doesn't do what I want, if it isn't politically subversive, if it isn't sexy, if it isn't stylish to make all that happen then it isn't truthfully worth listening to.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden. It is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Art is amoral; so is life. For me there are no obscene pictures or books; there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones.