Samantha Morton Quotes

What is art but a way of seeing?

There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem. It makes sense in my own mind, but I'm trying to figure out a way to articulate it... It's like looking at a painting: you're able to take in the totality of the work all at once, and so processing whatever information that painting is giving you is almost secondary to simply apprehending what's in front of you.

I have to assume that everybody interprets a piece of art they're exposed to as if it's already perfect in its wholeness, without knowing any backstory.

I always like to leave art and music open to interpretation.

When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.

What we value about music and literature are the moments that they create in our minds when we encounter them.

What mattered to Abu was the music of the sentence. 'A shadow does not belong to the object that casts it.' To Abu, it was a little poem. And in general, it was the poetics, the music of things that tossed his confetti.

All great art ... creates in the beholder not self-satisfacti on but wonder and awe. Its great liberation is to lift us out of ourselves.

The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter - perfect in its bud as in its bloom - with no reason to explain its presence - no mission to fulfill - a joy to the artist, a delusion to the philanthropist - a puzzle to the botanist - an accident of sentiment and alliteration to the literary man.

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

What Artistic and Scientific Experience Have in Common - Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking, and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science. If what is seen and experienced is portrayed in the language of logic, we are engaged in science. If it is communicated through forms whose connections are not accessible to the conscious mind but are recognized intuitively as meaninful, then we are engaged in art. Common to both is the loving devotion to that which transcends personal concerns and volition.

It has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? ...people who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

The beauty of poetry is that the creation transcends the poet.

Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.

The aim of the painting is that the eye should find out what it likes.

The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.

poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.

In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don't believe any real artist cares whether what he does is 'art' or not. Who, after all, knows what art is?

What a funny thing painting is. The abstract painters always insist on their connection with the visible reality, while the so called figurative artists insist that what they really care about, is the abstract qualities of life.

All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. To call this expression abstract seems to me often to confuse the issue. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract . . . a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.

Art is one of the dirtiest words in our language; it's mucked up with all kinds of meanings. There's the art of plumbing; there's the art of almost anything that you can say.

I don't how I can describe the quality that is only found in art (be it music, literature, painting, or whatever), this quality, it's just there, and it endures.

The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.