Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotes

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.

Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not.

The goal of art-making in general is communication.

In fairness, I don't think that everyone understands what I say, but I think they understand part of it and part of what the issues are... Just the same way that people like a good painting, I think people really like understanding, knowing about the world.

Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.'

Art's the biggest vanity: the assumption that one's view of peace or fright or beauty is permanently communicable.

You must put the essence of what you want to say into a painting. The rest is arbitrary. Chosen with discernment, but chosen, and choice involves elimination.

Art is the queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world.

I do think that art that doesn't communicate is useless.

What's so astonishing about not understanding? There are so many things in art, beginning with art itself, that one doesn't understand. A painter doesn't see everything that he has put in his painting.

I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.

A picture can say 1000 words but it can also inspire you to write 1000 more.

Understanding is a form of blindness. Good art, I think, can never be understood.

Eloquence is a painting of thought; and thus those who, after having painted it, add something more, make a picture instead of a portrait.

Beethoven was so hard of hearing, he thought he was a painter.

Much of appreciating art or music is really the interpretation of the listener. To a certain extent it's projection - it's what people need or lack in themselves that they then put upon these people that they admire.

All art is bad, but modern art is the worst.

Fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to crowds of unobservant unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing.

A work of art doesn't have to be explained.

Writing is the painting of the voice.

Our Nation has a diverse and extremely rich cultural heritage. It is a source of pride and strength to millions of Americans who look to the arts for inspiration, communication and the opportunity for creative self-expression.

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

What an artist does, is fail. Any reading of the literature, (I mean the literature of artistic creation), however summary, will persuade you instantly that the paradigmatic artistic experience is that of failure. The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition. There is something "out there" which cannot be brought "here". This is standard. I don't mean bad artists, I mean good artists. There is no such thing as a "successful artist" (except, of course, in worldly terms).

All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this - as in other ways - they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.