Jacques Maritain Quotes

Art is not about objects of high monetary exchange. It's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time.

When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?

Born of the sensibility, art sows and creates life in its turn.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience.

Writing is a creative art form and the acting and directing is more of an interpretive art form.

Philosophy can forsake too easily the details of experience… many writers and painters have demonstrated that thinking long about what art is or ought to be ruins the power to write or paint.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

Art is not living. It is the use of living. The artist has the ability to take the living and use it in a certain way and produce art.

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

I have a feeling that in art the need to understand and the need to communicate are one.

Art to me was a state: it didn't need to be an accomplishment.

Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

The goal of art-making in general is communication.

I love the art form of songwriting. I get to carry a lot of vibes to a lot of people. My songs are all about the human condition, and people will be able to find themselves in my songs.

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

The act of writing surprises me all the time. A miraculous thing happens when you have an idea and you want to convert it into words... and then you start to create a work of art, and that's another miracle, and it remains mysterious to the writer, or to this writer anyway.

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

My paintings and comedy have a lot in common. They are both improvisations based on observation.

Making music and writing kind of come from the same creative place.

I think great art comes from being open and creative with somebody, and of course, if feelings start getting involved in that, it can either make things fantastic or really messy.