George Orwell Quotes

I think in any work of art, there always will be randomness about what is good, what is bad.

If there is a category of human being for whom his work ought to speak for itself, it is the writer.

Mozart and Neil Diamond may have begun with the same idea, but that a work of art is more than an idea is confirmed by the difference between the 'Soave sia il vento' and 'Kentucky Woman.' We have different words for 'art' and 'idea' because they are two different things.

But the drawings are not created only to be sold.

I don't have anything to say about other people's art and their work.

Once people write criticism about something - and even in 1967 I was far from alone - they're assuming it's art, and art is supposed to last.

Is there really any relationship between artists' personal conduct and their art? Certainly not.

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

I don't think [price] reflects if the work is good or bad.A good artist shouldn't be nervous about that.

I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a 'message', but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world.

A picture, to be an interesting picture, must be more than a picture, otherwise it is only a reproduction of an object, and not an object of value in itself.

Part of my gradual education of myself has been to think that there is a deep relationship between the nature of the creature and the worth of the art.

A series is a big deal, and there are a lot of people out there writing stuff that don't know what art is.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.

That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives. All the attendant hoopla about it, the success over it or the critical rejection—none of that really matters. In the end, the thing will survive or not on its own merits. Not that immortality via art is any big deal. Truffaut died, and we all felt awful about it, and there were the appropriate eulogies, and his wonderful films live on. But it’s not much help to Truffaut.

While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.

We do not mean to count or weigh our contributions by any standard other than that of our abilities.

Nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece.

I'll buy a bottle for anyone who can tell me what makes a picture beautiful!

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

The only things that distinguish the photographer from everybody else are his pictures: they alone are the basis for our special interest in him. If pictures cannot be understood without knowing details of the artist's private life, then that is a reason for faulting them; major art, by definition, can stand independent of its maker.

Only the work of art itself can raise the standard of taste.

a work that intends to be art must first be entertaining.