John Guare Quotes

One of the few things that will remain of this time is what artists are doing. They are the journal and the diary of our time.

I believe the man who will go down in posterity is the man who paints his own time and the scenes of everyday life around him.

Art is to me the glorification of the human spirit, and as such it is the cultural documentation of the time in which it is produced.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

An artist is made to entertain. That's their primary goal, to entertain you. But some artists record the moments of time. You wouldn't know what was happening in the '20s and '30s; you got to check the song or art.

Art is the signature of a generation; artists have a way of defining the times.

LSD...reinforc ed my sense of what was important-creat ing great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.

I write in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done.

If there was a day that history was not recorded, then the history of one hundred days would be in peril.

History is the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.

Sound preservation is not only the history of our culture and our country but also a document of life in the world. There is something with sound that is so extraordinary that it can be preserved, that we can listen to a recording made in 1925 and be transported back to that time.

Melted down, silver is worth a little more than four dollars an ounce. But carved, inlaid, and engraved, and identified with a particular year, it becomes the direct reflection, often the literal record, of human history, our movement through time.

When you look at my father's works, he systematically dated everything. He also wanted to document what he knew would be the work of the century.

I may have crossed three-fourths of my life and I felt it would be worth jotting down my life in movies spanning decades.

I like to know that when I'm 90 years old, I'm going to be able to look at a song or poem I wrote and say, 'Wow! I remember I was so crazy about this person,' or 'I remember what that day felt like.'

Like, music and songs, what we do, we can capture history as artists, so that's what I really try to do.

Abolishing the book is like abolishing the symphony, or sonata form, or the sonnet, or the wall painting.

When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.

As an actor, I only play what is in the moment, rather than in the future, but sometimes the past is more important than what is coming up in the future.

Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine.

I was 45 when I wrote most of this book [Hungry Heart ], at what felt like a halfway point in my life, and I thought, If I can't be honest now, when will it happen? It was so hard to step away from the [protection of] fiction, but I'm ready to talk start telling their truth.

Some people will say, "Why read a comic book? It stifles the imagination. If you read a novel you imagine what people are like. If you read a comic, it's showing you." The only answer I can give is, "You can read a Shakespeare play, but does that mean you wouldn't want to see it on the stage?

If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.

In every domain of art, a work that corresponds to the need of its day carries a message of social and cultural value. It is the artist who crystallizes his age ... who fixes his time in history.

History is organized memory, and the organization is all important!