Marvin Hamlisch Quotes

My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

When you start to think of the arts as not this thing that is going to get you somewhere in terms of becoming an artist or becoming famous or whatever it is that people do, but rather a way of making being in the world not just bearable, but fascinating, then it starts to get interesting again.

It is brilliant going to the theatre and being forced to sit and listen and think about life. It can be almost a near-religious experience.

I think that experiencing through art is a wonderful way to expand the horizon and everything around it.

A painter may be looking at the world in a way which is very different from everyone else. If he's a craftsman, he can get other people to see the world through his eyes, and so he enlarges our vision, perception, and there's great value in that.

There's an audience for all kinds of great art.

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.

I have realised how exciting and easy it is to be a time traveller by looking at paintings and films and architecture and playing music or listening to it. I don't think you necessarily have to live in the present all the time.

I couldn't recommend more that people put themselves in a situation where they can see a lot of work that they admire, and for free.

Every artist in the world likes his or her work to make people think.

I think that some works are more accessible than others.

The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.

If you're not educated to enjoy the arts, if you're not taken to a concert, or you don't hear something beautiful, you don't know what you're missing.

You're lacking a human dimension of some sort if you're not interested in the arts.

I think that a society lives or dies according to its respect for - for its art.

The arts are so important not only to society but to ourselves as human beings. It keeps in touch with our own humanity. So access to the arts in any way, shape, or form is vital.

The imagination is an innate gift, but it needs refinement and cultivation; this is what the humanities provide.

The purpose of art is to accumulate the human within the human being.

I don't enjoy art.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

I can't think of anything outside of having the gift yourself and creating yourself. I can't think of the next better thing to do than being able to put it back. Creative expression, I think, is vital to the success of any society.... A society without art will die.

I don't really have any faith in anybody enjoying photographs in a large enough sense to matter. I think it's all about finances, on one side.

I still hope that more people can create art, even though artistic genres may never be the most popular or money-making genres. But the thing is, I think art is more long-lasting. It stays in people, and it changes them.

I'm happy to have interns at The Weekly Standard and happy to have readers of The Weekly Standard, but if you all tell me that you were busy reading Plato and [Lev] Tolstoy and playing violin in the orchestra, I'd say that was great. I wouldn't tell you to take time out from that to get involved in political journalism.

Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.