Anthony Burgess Quotes

A composer knows that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not something separated from it.

Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?

As to...old composers like Schubert or Beethoven, I imagine that, while modern music expresses both feeling, thought and imagination, they expressed pure feeling. And you know all day sitting at work, eating, walking, etc., you have hundreds of feelings that can't be put into words. And that is why I think that in a sense music is the highest of the arts, because it really begins where the others leave off.

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Real art is illumination, it adds stature to life.

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.

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

Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.

It's important as a writer to do my art well and do it in a way that is powerful and beautiful and meaningful, so that my work regenerates the people, certainly Indian people, and the earth and the sun. And in that way we all continue forever.

A purely materialistic art would be like a tree which is expected to bear fruit without flowering and to sacrifice grace and beauty for mere utility

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

There is no art without intention.

No art can develop until it penetrates deeply into the life of the people.

I think art parallels life; it is not a report on nature or on intimate disclosure of inner secrets. Color, in my opinion, behaves like man -- in two distinct ways: first in self-realization and then in the realization of relationships with others.

Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be.

Art without life is a poor affair.

Beethoven's string quartets express pain itself; it is not MY pain.

Those who were still able to write beautiful melodies were kitsch composers like Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky approaches true art not in his numerous beautiful melodies, but when a melodic line is thwarted.

Art for art's sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.

Leo Tolstoy said the purpose of art is to teach you to love life. And that's what I want.

To awaken human emotion is the highest level of art.

Music truely has to all other arts the same relation as religion to the church.

I think one's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes. I see no reason for painting but that. If I have anything to offer, it is my emotional contact with the place where I live and the people I do.

Art needs to stand for something.