Jeremy Bentham Quotes

Theatre critics have no special access to the truth. And there should be no objective truth to art.

People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.

Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.

What is one man's hate speech is another man's poetry.

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

People shouldn't trust artists and they shouldn't trust art. Part of the fun of art is that it invites you to interpret it.

If someone stands in front of one of my paintings and says, 'This is just a mess', the word 'just' is not so good, but 'mess' might be right. Why not a mess? If it makes you say, 'Wow, I've never seen anything like that', that's beautiful.

If you can even manage to tell exactly what a song is about, all you do is put that song in a box forever, and it loses its evocative power.

The one thing about art is you can't question it. Everyone is looking at everyone else to find out what's cool. No one knows what's cool.

I envy poets because nobody ever asks them if it's true or false.

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.

Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes, so that it's really left open for a lot of things, even though I remember a specific impression of something I had at the time. I can't say a song is about this or that; in fact, I wouldn't even want to. I just prefer to have people live it anyway they want. Because it's theirs after that. There's nothing I can do about it anymore

Artistic license sneered through the thin fabric.

If a man writes a brilliant enough play in praise of something that is universally loathed, the play, if it is good and well enough written, should not be knocked down because of its approach to its subject.

A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.

Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.

I don't think you need to be so result-oriented when you're trying to define the success of an art work. I think we can allow some unpredictability.

The poets are almost always wrong about the facts... That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth...

A movie is just like a work of art or a book or a piece of music. The intent of its maker is one thing, but its interpretation by an audience is something else. I don't stop at what the filmmaker wanted to do.

A work of art doesn't have to be explained.

Poets can tell the truth as they see it. It’s the author’s story, the author’s voice.

He said, "You have pigs in this poem; pigs are not poetic." I got up and walked out of that class and never went back.

Sometimes I make films about scenes other filmmakers would leave out, so I just make the film out of all the things they wouldn't put in. Poetry allows you to do this more than prose, for example.