Leo Ornstein Quotes

I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied.

Films are made for audience's appreciation but films are also made for artistic satisfaction.

Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss.

It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.

You can just start writing, but you're gonna go off on 10 or 12 starts and weird tangents, and yeah you'll have those pages to use later - to gift wrap some fish for your mother - but either way you're gonna have pages.

Since a true knowledge of nature gives us pleasure, a lively imitation of it, either in poetry or painting, must produce a much greater; for both these arts are not only true imitations of nature, but of the best nature.

In Science the paramount appeal is to the Intellect-its purpose being instruction; in Art, the paramount appeal is to the Emotions-its purpose being pleasure.

I don't enjoy any of the process of writing. I enjoy it when it goes on if it zings and it has great warmth and import and it's successful.

When I am writing, even though it's hard and I do struggle often, I am happier than when I'm not writing. I feel alive. Whereas when I'm not writing, I feel like your common every-day neurotic.

I'd hate to be a writer forever and never perform, and I'd hate to perform and not write. I get sad if time has passed and I haven't written or made anything. I'm an artist.

I have never expected anything from my work but the satisfaction I could get from it by the very fact of painting and saying what I couldn't say otherwise.

Most musicians remain poor. But the music that they make, even if it does not bring them millions, gives millions of people happiness.

I feel like success to me is about feeling like I have done something in storytelling, where I've gotten close to articulating something intangible that I'm feeling, and I think I get closer every time, but I don't know that I've done that yet.

I wouldn't say the purpose of making art is to enjoy it necessarily. For me, it happens to be the thing I enjoy the most. I don't even know what the purpose of art is really, I just know that is something that makes me feel satisfied in a way that other things don't. That's all I know, that's why I like to write songs and films or draw. I just like to make things and somehow I find it gives me a feeling of satisfaction that I can't find in other areas of my life.

For a creative person there's just as much pleasure in writing an eight-line poem as there is in writing a blockbuster play ... of the old '50s type.

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.

It would be nice to abandon the verse-chorus-bridge structure completely, and make it so none of these things are definable. ... Make up new names for them. Instead of a bridge, you can call it a highway, or an overpass. ... Music should never be harmless. ... I remember from my earliest years, people speaking, you know, in a certain kind of rhythm and telling stories and sharing experiences in a way that was different in Indian country than it was other places. And I was really struck by this and obviously very affected by it, because it's always come out in my songs.

I think many writers write because it's a convenient way to explain themselves to themselves. We take the chaos and the turmoil and the bullshit of our lives, and we make it into something that has a harmonious shape and sound.

Among the several kinds of beauty, the eye takes most delight in colors.

Because you are beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence

People's creativity is very much alive, but when they get paid for their creativity, they often experience that as rather meaningless. Money as the reward for their creative process is very one-dimensional, a tremendous comedown.

The end-purpose of all art is enjoyment!

Most great art is freedom within form. Without form, we are amateurs, without freedom, we are robots.

Since I have known God in a saving manner, painting, poetry, and music have had charms unknown to me before. I have received what I suppose is a taste for them, or religion has refined my mind and made it susceptible of impressions from the sublime and beautiful. O, how religion secures the heightened enjoyment of those pleasures which keep so many from God, by their becoming a source of pride!

We must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and to the expression of moral and esthetic values as we now give to science, to invention, to practical organization. One without the other is impotent.