Virginia Woolf Quotes

He [Andy Warhol] engaged people and I think all of that is what helped keep him keyed in to the times beyond all of the celebrity stuff that was going on around him. He was much more like a fan than a celebrity himself.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents.

Fortunately age does not affect literature. After a man is dead, he may continue in the business and often rank higher than his living competitors.

In poetically well built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time.

Where bright imagination reigns, the fine-wrought spirit feels acuter pains.

Modern man has been in search of a new language of form to satisfy new longings and aspirations - longings for mental appeasement, aspirations to unity, harmony, serenity - an end to his alienation from nature. All these arts of remote times or strange cultures either give or suggest to the modern artist forms which he can adapt to his needs, the elements of a new iconography.

Nothing ought to be more weighed than the nature of books recommended by public authority. So recommended, they soon form the character of the age.

As an experienced artist, I carry my work like a secret pregnancy. I am always aware of inner life and the need to protect it.

That frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject, you cannot do it by not being lost yourself.

The word compositon moved me spiritually and I made it my aim in life to paint a composition. It affected me like a prayer and filled me with awe.

In music the mystical element is definitely there all the time, and one can see it. When it comes to rock and roll, when it comes to any kind of industry, it's not there. It's not there. So it's a battle between the two. Music, Industry.

I speak with the Eternal through the instrument of nature, through the world's history: I read the soul of the artist in his Apollo.

Painting' and 'religious experience' are the same thing. It is a question of the perpetual motion of a right idea.

In secluding himself too much from society, an author is in danger of losing that intimate acquaintance with life which is the only sure foundation of power in a writer.

Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen.

Man is apt to be more moved by the art of his own period, not because it is more perfect, but because it is organically related to him.

There are many other writers whose work I admire tremendously, but none whose work struck me at just the right young age. Jack Vance taught me that speculative fiction, science fiction, could be wonderfully and liberatingly stylistic. It didn't have to be pulp stuff. He really changed my writing and my view of science fiction, so if nothing else, my little homage to him in the novelette I wrote for that anthology is my thank-you to him. He helped me see that any genre can have excellent writing in it.

A writer is a reader moved to emulation.

Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

I suppose that anyone who does any kind of creative work some time in their life - especially as you grow into middle age! - you come to a time where you really question more and more frequently, whether you have anything else to offer. And at its worst, you feel utterly bereft of whatever creative force it takes to do that work.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God.

The Artist submits from day to day to the fatal rhythm of the impulses of the universal world which encloses him, continual centre of sensations, always pliant, hypnotized by the marvels of nature which he loves, he scrutinizes. His eyes, like his soul, are in perpetual communion with the most fortuitous of phenomena.

Literature is the voice of the age and the state; the character, energy, and resources of the country are reflected and imaged forth in the conceptions of its great minds; they are organs of the time; they speak not their own language, they scarce think their own thoughts; but under an impulse like the prophetic enthusiasm of old, they must feel and utter the sentiments which society inspires.

Everything in art must spring from the movement of our whole life-stream, of our whole being - including the unconscious.