Stendhal Quotes

A novel is a mirror walking down a road

This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That’s why everything is exactly the wrong way around.

Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.

I feel that as artists - whatever your medium is - I feel that we're watching what goes on around us and we take what we don't see, or we don't hear, or we don't feel and we do something that speaks of it; more about it, for it, or against it - whatever our perspective is - that's what our job is.

Basically, an artist should be a mirror, or a reflection of society or his or her environment. What you see is what you can articulate.

A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

I think the job of art and drama is to hold a mirror up to those things and say, 'What do you think about it?'

I like art with a visible string to the world.

Artists don't create society, they reflect it

If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one's life, without seeing oneself in the "mirror" of literature?

There is no nobler chore in the craft of writing than holding up the mirror of reality and turning it slightly, so we have a new and different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the 'normal,' the obvious. People are reflected in the glass. The fantasy situation into which you thrust them is the mirror itself. And what we are shown should illuminate and alter our perception of the world around us. Failing that, you have failed totally.

A story of particular facts is a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which it distorts.

The comedy of each age holds up a mirror to the people of that age, a mirror that is unique.

Poetry looking in the mirror sees art, and art looking in a mirror sings poetry.

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

Movies mirror the times, they do not create them.

Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.

I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.

Accurate drawing, accurate colour, is perhaps not the essential thing to aim at, because the reflection of reality in a mirror, if it could be caught, colour and all, would not be a picture at all, no more than a photograph.

I'm just a journalist. I shine a mirror to the culture. I give the cop-out answer.

Artists hold out the mirror to the bruises on the face of the world.

If art reflects life, it does so with special mirrors.

Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration.