Harry Callahan Quotes

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.

It's not about perfection. What's a perfect painting? What's interesting about a perfect painting?

What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called 'cliche.'

I try to make things that are fresh and different, even if they are inspired by classic things.

It's hard to make something that's interesting. It's really, really hard. It's like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that's written or anything that's created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity... So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such an act of will.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want.

But business is just a vehicle for transforming the ideas in your head into something real, something tangible, that actually improves the lives of others. To create something unique and beautiful and valuable is very hard. It’s very special to do. It doesn’t happen fast.

In my actual imaginative contact with life, I am vastly more responsive to beauty than to horror - indeed, I never experience real cosmic horror except in infrequent nightmares. However, when I come to record my various imaginative experiences, I generally find that only the horror items have any uniqueness or originality. Others have seen the same beautiful things that I have seen, & have sung them more nobly.

It's wonderful that nothing you write is ever going to be as beautiful as what's in your head, because that gap is where the art can enter and begin to stretch its limbs.

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

There is no intellectual or emotional substitute for the authentic, the original, the unique masterpiece.

I do worry that it's impossible to write something original, that there's nothing that a human hasn't already thought of. But I can put it out of my mind and get on with what I'm doing.

Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.

I had a teacher in art school who said something about the only works he really enjoyed seeing or found much in were works where he had a sense that a discovery was made in the course of making this object. I like to hold to that as my marching orders.

Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can't be taught.

Every song, every form of art, clothing, shoes, it has to be special.

I think the form, the Hollywood movie, I think the quality is obviously always going to be there and I think that the question of taste, there's always a question of taste.

I'm not that obsessed with making representations of ugliness. Everything I've seen is beautiful.

Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.

That's the beauty of creativity. It comes from the ether. I like to think, sometimes, it's like I haven't written it, it's more like I just reached up and grabbed it from somewhere. That song, 'Song of the Red Rock Mountain,' is one of them. I recorded it and thought, 'Where did that come from?'

I certainly like it if the work is beautiful, but that's a surplus effect. I can only think about that after I consider how it's made.

I'd rather have people really be able to step back and get their money's worth and look at me as a true artist than somebody who is just regurgitating other material.

I think that something needs to be weird in order to have a real beauty.

Modeling, for me, isn't about being beautiful but creating something interesting for people to look at and think about.