F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

I think there is an element of nihilism about, but I don't think most artists feel their work is meaningless.

I don't believe that artists really are interested in money. That's not the motivation for art.

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

The beauty of art is that it allows you to slow down, and for a moment, things that once seemed unfamiliar become precious to you.

My search not only failed, but I convinced myself that all those who had searched like myself had failed also, and come like me to the despairing conviction that the only absolute knowledge man can possess is this—that life is without a meaning.

One cannot create an art that speaks to men when one has nothing to say.

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

ART Art is that thing having to do only with itself—the product of a successful attempt to make a work of art. Unfortunately, there are no expamples of art, nor good reasons to think that it will ever exist. (Everything that has been made has been made with a purpose, teverything with an end exists outside of that thing, i.e., "I want to sell this", or "I want this to make me famous and loved", or "I want this to make me whole", or worse, "I want this to make others whole.") And yet we continue to write, paint, sculpt and compose. Is this foolish of us?

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.

Art is an intersection of many human needs.

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

Just because life's meaningless doesn't mean we can't experience it meaningfully.

One cannot demand of art that it pay you in any other way than in the satisfaction of the work itself.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.

If art doesn't require an audience, can an intimate conversation be a work of art? Can a thought be a work of art? Maybe. I don't know. These questions are completely hypothetical for me, because I love interacting with audiences. I want my poems to be heard.

The magic question is, 'What for?' But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal.

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

Real art is illumination, it adds stature to life.

The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.

ALL ART, OF COURSE, IS INTELLECTUAL, BUT FOR ME, ALL THE ARTS, AND CINEMA EVEN MORE SO, MUST ABOVE ALL BE EMOTIONAL AND ACT UPON THE HEART.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

The end-purpose of all art is enjoyment!

There is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom insight and life of each person who has known and loved it.

In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.