Jean Anouilh Quotes

The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.

Art is the employent of the powers of nature for an end.

The purpose of art is to collide the intellectual and visceral together at the highest speed possible.

The goal of art was the vital expression of self.

Whether I'm writing scripts or prose, the goal is identical. To give pleasure. Now whether I succeed or not is up for debate, and, mostly, I fail. But I try. I like to make things. It's a way to stay busy during one's ephemeral and confusing life.

Through my art I have tried to explain my life and its meaning. I have also intended to help others to clarify their lives.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at-not copy it.

The artist must have something to say, for mastery over form is not his goal but rather the adapting of form to its inner meaning.

In art, truth is a means to an end; in science, it is the only end.

A work of art is something produced by a person, but is not that person — it is of her, but is not her. It’s a reach, really — the artist is trying to inhabit, temporarily, a more compact, distilled, efficient, wittier, more true-seeing, precise version of herself — one that she can’t replicate in so-called ‘real’ life, no matter how hard she tries. That’s why she writes: to try and briefly be more than she truly is.

art is not advocacy and advocacy is not art.

Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.

The purpose of art is to re-present nature, not represent it.

If I were of the trade, I should naturalize art as much as they "artialize" nature.

The great end of all arts is to make an impression on the imagination and the feeling. The imitation of nature frequently does this. Sometimes it fails and something else succeeds.

All art is a form of artifice.For in art there can be no prejudices.

An odd contradiction, if the layman were correct in his unconscious assumption that an artist begins with reality and ends with art: the converse is true - to the degree that this dichotomy has any truth - the artist begins with art, and through it arrives at reality.

The form of a work of art, which gives speech to their thoughts and is, therefore, their mode of talking, is always somewhat uncertain, like all kinds of speech.

Moral beauty is the basis of all true beauty. This foundation is somewhat covered and veiled in nature. Art brings it out, and gives it more transparent forms. It is here that art, when it knows well its power and resources, engages in a struggle with nature in which it may have the advantage.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.

Don't make the mistake of believing it's enough to reproduce the realities of life.... The object of art is to give life a shape, and to do it by every conceivable artifice.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

It became a question of taste. I have a certain taste in art history. And that - I had a huge library of art history books in my studio. And I would simply have the models go through those books with me, and we began a conversation about, like, what painting means, why we do it, why people care about it why or how it can mean or make sense today.