Anatole France Quotes

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

I'm inspired by looking at art, by looking at precedent. Looking is what you have to do if you want to make things, so you develop a critical eye.

Beauty really has such a wide field of interpretation. I guess that's why it's forever fascinating.

But of works of art little can be said.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

Art is an investigation.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.

When you are talking about someone's art, it is usually so personal.

The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.

I think art is more glorious than life but not more real.

Good art is art that allows you to enter it from a variety of angles and to emerge with a variety of views.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

Art will never be able to exist without nature.

I believe that the reason why I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective. There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.

I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility.

Art is always kind of snooping and listening in.

For me, music is pure abstraction.

Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.

Art, of course, is a way of thinking, a way of mining reality.

Jed Perl writes precisely and ecstatically. Antoine' s Alphabet is a history and a fairy tale, a work of criticism, and a work of art.

I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence.