Neal Cassady Quotes

A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.

Throwing money at something doesn't really create - forgive me that onerous word - art.

If you cannot learn to love real art, at least learn to hate sham art and reject it.

As soon as any art is pursued with a view of money, then farewell, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, all hope of genuine good work.

Great art always transcends its culture, while lesser art merely reflects it.

Great art is not instant. It comes from experience, it comes from a place within. If you're trying to generate material, then you're going to generate stuff. It's not going to be great, it's just going to be stuff.

Part of my gradual education of myself has been to think that there is a deep relationship between the nature of the creature and the worth of the art.

Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is great matter.

The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.

Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.

Too much art was no art at all. Like candy instead of bread!

Public opinion which, to be sure, can at times be helpful, must never for an instant swerve us from what we know in our heart we are trying to convey. For honesty is the great requisite of art. If we remain honest with ourselves, art, which is always there, never lets us down.

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.

It is not what an artist does that counts...but what he is.

A great work of Art demands a great thought or a thought of beauty adequately expressed. - Neither in Art nor Literature more than in Life can an ordinary thought be made interesting because well-dressed.

Although I do not care for the slogan "art for art's sake", there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.

Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.

Art is great only when it bears the stamp of the individual.

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.

I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.

Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral. The size of the project means little in art, beyond the money matter. It is the quality of the character that really counts.

The fact that cartoons are reproduced doesn't mean anything to me as far as whether they are "real art" or not.

It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.