Patrick Carney Quotes

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

Art is amoral; so is life. For me there are no obscene pictures or books; there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones.

All I can do is say I smell a rat. I don't know where it is or what kind of rat it is, but as an artist, I can express how. But I couldn't responsibly stand up and tell people which way to go, because then I'm just as guilty as the people who are telling everybody else what to do and where to go.

Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.

Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.

Morality is a code of black and white. When and if men attempt a compromise, it is obvious which side will necessarily lose and which will necessarily profit.

Morality is a luxury we can't afford out here. There's no right or wrong, just survival or death.

On "Tonight" I think I was torn dreadfully between writing what I wanted to write, but keeping it in a style that would follow up what I had just done. That's where I feel I was untrue to myself as an artist . . . that album and, to a lesser extent, "Never Let Me Down."

Art is no crime. It's every artist's responsibility to make art that is meaningful

It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.

Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.

The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread and the highest form of literature, Poetry, brings no wealth to the singer.

Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre.

... the great artists ... do not want security, egoistic or materialistic.

It would nice to live in a world where art can just be art!

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.

I write a song because I want to. I think the moment you start writing it to make money, you're starting to kill yourself artistically.

A writer survives in spite of his beliefs.

For a poet, style is the only morality.

I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.

Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist's artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all.

What a terrible world it would be if we only did films that were poster boards for political causes.

Art functioning as propaganda is not art.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth