Henry James Quotes

What makes a tight circle or a tight little square box more of an intellectual statement than something done emotionally, I don't know. Art is an essence, a center.

Opera is the ultimate art form. It has singing and music and drama and dance and emotion and story.

This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence.

There was an era when people would turn on their radio and hear a radio drama. Now, you could be as scared by that as seeing it filmed. In those days, people used to sit by the fire and imagine what they were hearing. Everything is its own art form.

As an art form, opera is a rare and remarkable creation. For me, it expresses aspects of the human drama that cannot be expressed in any other way, or certainly not as beautifully.

Take a quart of nature, boil it down to a pint, and the residue is art.

Properly understood, style is not a seductive decoration added to a functional structure; it is of the essence of a work of art. The necessary elements of style are lucidity, elegance, and individuality; these three qualities combine to form a preservative which ensures the nearest approximation to permanence in the fugitive art of letters.

I think art is a total thing. A total person giving a contribution. It is an essence, a soul.. In my inner soul art and life are inseparable

Tragedy is the highest form of art.

Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist's artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all.

Anything that's really good, everybody wants to put their hands on. The multimedia puts their hands on it and everything happens that makes it global. Then people forget the roots of it and people forget why they care about it, and then it gets torn apart and turns so commercial that you don't even know what the essence of this art form is even about.

I started writing plays, but the fact that plays don't last forever was too much for me to bear.

When you paint Spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots - just paint Spring.

I don't know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they're really good. And there's just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that's the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there's going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don't care whether it's art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don't think so.

The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values.

[Rewriting is] a whole other art form; it's about craftsmanship.

The secret to dancing is that it is about everything except dancing.

Why are you so weird?" "Because my weird has to be able to cancel out your weird, Lady Cross-stitch." "At least what I do is considered an art form." "Yes, in ye olde medieal Europse you would've been quite the catch-

I'd always wanted to tell people that when I work on my body I'm thinking about classical sculpture, so I jumped at the chance to show off body building as an art form.

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.

Music at its essence is what gives us memories.

One does not consider style, because style is.

Magic is a powerful art that can support a weak performer.

Insecurity's best cover is perfectionism. That's where it becomes an art form.

I could be just a writer very easily. I am not a writer. I am a screenwriter, which is half a filmmaker... But it is not an art form, because screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.