David Mamet Quotes

There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.

While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.

As a younger man, I thought the best thing art could do was to challenge people's mindsets, and I still do, but I've come round to the value of entertainment. A show like 'The Interceptor,' which gives the audience that release, after a hard day, of just sitting down and enjoying themselves - that adds value to lives, too.

I don't see art as entertainment.

Because my work is naturally non-meaningful, the meaning found in it will remain doubtful and inconsistent - which is the way it should be. All that I care about is that, like any startling piece of nature, it should be capable of stimulating meaning.

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.

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.

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.

Art is an intersection of many human needs.

I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of. I've never been a bit interested in the fact that this was a picture of a blues musician or a street corner or something.

Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself. It is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

Art doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it.

Because of their origin and purpose, the meanings of art are of a different order from the operational meanings of science and technics: they relate, not to external means and consequences, but to internal transformations, and unless it produce these internal transformations the work of art is either perfunctory or dead.

The work of art... is an instrument for tilling the human psyche, that it may continue to yield a harvest of vital beauty.

One cannot demand of art that it pay you in any other way than in the satisfaction of the work itself.

Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.

Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

Art can excite, titillate, please, entertain, and sometimes shock; but its ultimate function is to ennoble.

History may clarify our understanding of the supreme work of art, but can never account for it completely; for the Time of art is not the same as the Time of history.

If one could only reproduce nature, and always with less beauty than the original, why paint at all?

In a sense, the first (if not necessarily the prime) function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain. If the poem, painting, play or novel does not immediately engage one's surface interest then it has failed. Whatever else it may or may not be, art is also entertainment. Bad art fails to entertain. Good art does something in addition.

Great art is cathartic; it is always moral.

In other things the knowing artist may Judge better than the people; but a play, (Made for delight, and for no other use) If you approve it not, has no excuse.