F. Sionil Jose Quotes

There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.

I wish to share and pass down some of my generation's traits, and encourage young people to create their own art, music, and literature.

Great art would have 'head': it would have interesting intellectual ideas and concepts. It would have 'heart' in that it would have passion and heart and soul. And it would have 'hand' in that it would be greatly crafted.

What I am out to do is make sure that the Met continues to be the most exciting encyclopedic museum in the world. I want to sustain the vibrancy that makes it exciting to work here, that makes it exciting for visitors. The art remains central.

Tradition can, to be sure, participate in a creation, but it can no longer be creative itself.

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

Once something is memorable, it's living and you're using it. That to me is the foundation of a creative society.

A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.

I love traditions. I mean, cultural ones.

The arts are a major life nourishment.

I have a deep rooted folk sensibility that I can't get away from completely.

In these confused times, the role of classical music is at the very core of the struggle to reassert cultural and ethical values that have always characterized our country and for which we have traditionally been honored and respected outside our shores.

It's good to pass on stories.

There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.

I love history... everything is inspired by history, so that's why I love vintage and antiques.

Read the folklore masters. Go to galleries. Walk in the woods. That's what you need to be an artist or storyteller.

National cultures and heritages must compete for man's attention with the mind-absorbing advances of universal science.

Art is the permanence of a civilization.

A deep meaning resides in old customs.

Most musicals are informed by very rigid archetypes. If you get a very sophisticated mind writing them, you sense something else, but it's a folk-art form, really, at its best. At different times, I've tried to push against it as much as I possibly could, but ultimately, it is a folk-art form.

New York, for decades, offered a perpetual series of 'golden ages' to artists. You constantly had to measure yourself against the best, and you had to watch them, which meant that your imagination and also your sense of what the market could stand got very, very sharp.

I can't just go into the studio with one idea and be all in on that, 100 percent. It takes me a while to arrive at something that feels like it's finished.

I'm a storyteller. I do this for the next generations. They have to know what traditional alpinism is all about.

We know that art is connected with the land, with its salt, with its smell, that outside of national culture there is no art. Cosmopolitanism - a world in which things lose their color and form, and words lose their significance. We love in our past all that we consider native, wonderful and fair.

Conservatism has always meant more to me than simply sticking up for private property & free enterprise. It has also meant defending our heritage & preserving our values.