Walker Percy Quotes

I have a feeling that in art the need to understand and the need to communicate are one.

All art to me is an empathetic act. Whoever's telling a story is trying to transfer emotion into someone else.

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of...recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it.

It's about communication, no matter how impossibly hard your art is to understand and how much of an ivory tower or high horse you get on, it's still basically communication or why are you doing it?

You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.

The only way an artist can communicate with the world at large is on the level of feeling.

People like my films. They understand me through my films; it's like a connection that has been established between all my work and myself and the audience and the viewer.

The arts open your heart and mind to possibilities that are limitless. They are pathways that touch upon our brains and emotions and bring sustenance to imagination. Human beings' greatest form of communication, they walk in tandem with science and play, and best describe what it is to be human.

A poem is a window that hangs between two or more human beings who otherwise live in darkened rooms.

An exhibition is in many ways a series of conversations. Between the artist and viewer, curator and viewer, and between the works of art themselves. It clicks when an exhibition feels like it has answered some questions, and raised even more.

All our feelings, like the artist's paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.

Words build bridges into unexplored regions.

I think at any point, as an artist, whatever the medium - just having an audience means the world.

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

Art is about profundity. It's about connecting to everything that it means to be alive, but you have to act.

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.

When people don't know who you are, they're seeing your work for the first time. But if they've seen a lot, getting certain things across is a more difficult.

Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know.

The goal of art-making in general is communication.

I think one of my better gifts as a writer is empathy.

Poetry is a sort of homecoming.

Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.

If after you read something, you connect with it, you want to do it.

Writing is incredibly important to me as a way of handling the world, understanding how it works.