Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.

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

There's obviously always danger in making music or art for art's sake. Even as Christians we can be guilty of that, being more about the art than the Artist who gave us this gift.

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.

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

Jesus & his apostles & disciples were all artists

An artist worthy of the name should express all the truth of nature, not only the exterior truth, but also, and above all, the inner truth.

Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.

It's good to be employable, but I hope to show the truth. The paintings seem true because nobody wants me to do them.

When I write I don't aim to shock people, and I'm surprised when I do. But I don't think that anything that occurs in life should be omitted from art, though the artist should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly. I set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking.

The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.

A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.

My goal as a creative person is to express truth and beauty in whatever I do

My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty.

The modern composer builds his works on the basis of truth.

Art still has truth. Take refuge there.

If nothing will finally survive of life besides what artists report of it, we have no right to report what we know to be lies.

It’s one of my loose theories that Catholicism and art have gone well together because both believe in the physical manifestation of the spiritual world.

The joy is in the creation. So I've never had a target audience, it's always been about being true to the work as it emerges.

If artists do see fields blue they are deranged, and should go to an asylum. If they only pretend to see them blue, they are criminals and should go to prison.

In a sense, I feel like the job of the artist at all times is essentially the same, which is simply to tell the truth. I mean, I'm nervous about any prescriptions for what a writer should or shouldn't do.

The push and pull of representing your world responsibly and your artistic license is a tricky balance.

There is only one Art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. ... Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.