Gunter Grass Quotes

Art is not only about angst.

I don't think I'm making any great statements, and I certainly don't think I'm making art.

We made records to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records. I still feel that way. I put out a record because I think it's beautiful, not necessarily commercial.

All art is quite useless.

I'm a huge walking oxymoron. People think they're going to get something that's a lot different from what they get.

When you're an artist, you're working, literally, for the sole purpose of art, and when people discredit you, it's probably the most disrespectful thing you can do.

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.

Art for art's sake is dead, if it ever lived.

Art can be very political but that can't be the purpose of art, it can't be the driving force. It isn't with any of the books that I love, anyway.

Art for art's sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.

To me, art is the glorification of the human spirit.

Real art is illumination, it adds stature to life.

I really believe in empty spaces, although, as an artist, I make a lot of junk. Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that has art in it. An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have but that he, for some reason, thinks it would be a good idea to give them.

The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.

Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden. It is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Mankind cannot get on without a certain amount of absurdity.

The morality of art is in its very beauty.

Art is an end in itself; its values are intrinsic.

I usually don't mind movies that people think go overboard because that's what art is all about. Art is about pushing us and making us examine ourselves.

grievance does not make for great art.

Can one make works which are not works of 'art'?

My aim is not to exhibit craft, but rather to submerge it, and make it rightfully the handmaiden of beauty, power and emotional content.

I am afraid that as evangelicals, we think that a work of art only has value if we reduce it to a tract.