John Banville Quotes

Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.

There are so many things to be considered in making music. The whole question of life itself... I know that I want to produce beautiful music, music that does things to people that they need.

My primary thing is to make a painting, not necessarily to make a painting to sell for gazillions of dollars, but just to make a painting.

Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

As an artist, the most important thing and the most special thing is when your intention shines through on the work.

I think that's always the goal of art, is to make people ask themselves questions.

An artist’s job is to captivate… if we stumble into truth, we got lucky.

How do I define a work of art? It is not an asset in the stock-exchange sense, but a man's timid attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing.

The eternal task of song can never be finished in a single lifetime. That is the beauty and fascination of the art. Once you begin to phrase finely, you will feel more joy in the beautiful finish of a beautiful phrase than that caused by the loudest applause of an immense audience. The latter excites for a moment; the former endures forever.

I am very much interested in the so-called useless object. I mean, it takes perfect craftsmanship, beautiful material carefully measured and crafted, but at the same time it’s really useless.

I really try to divorce myself from any thought of possible use of this stuff. That's part of the discipline. My only purpose while I'm working is to try to make interesting photographs, and what to do with them is another act - an alter consideration. Certainly while I'm working, I want them to be as useless as possible.

When an artist paints a picture he does not want you to consider his personality as represented in that picture - he wants you to look at the beauty of that picture. No one cares who has painted the picture as long as it is beautiful.

The real artist while he paints does not think of the sale, only of the need to make a beautiful living thing.

It fascinates me to create beautiful paintings with the simplest means.

I'm not a painter who's saying, "I want people to see my work when I die; it will be this and that." That's not satisfying to me.

The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

The subject may be of first importance to the artist when he starts a picture, but it should be of least importance in the finished product. The subject is of no aesthetic significance.

The skills of the modern artist are the opposite of those of the craftsman: instead of acquiring techniques for producing classes of objects, the artist today perfects the means suited to his particular work.

Being an artist doesn’t take much, just everything you got. Which means, of course, that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it’s no big deal. They are one in the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it, I transcend all this meaningless gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission.

When an artist explains what he is doing, he usually has to do one of two things: either scrap what he has explained, or make his work fit in with the explanation.

[The artist's aim is] not to instruct the viewer, but to give him information... . The artist would follow his predetermined premise to its conclusion, avoiding subjectivity. Chance, taste, or unconsciously remembered forms would play no part in the outcome. The serial artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of his premise.

[...] I've come to the conclusion that the artist can not justify life or come up with a cogent reason as to why life is meaningful, but the artist can provide you with a cold glass of water on a hot day.

People should practice an art in order to make their souls grow and not to make money or become famous. Paint a picture. Write.

The division between the useful arts and the fine arts must not be understood in too absolute a manner. In the humblest work of the craftsmen, if art is there, there is a concern for beauty, through a kind of indirect repercussion that the requirements of the creativity of the spirit exercise upon the production of an object to serve human needs.

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.