Jane Smiley Quotes

... maybe that's all anyone who writes or paints or sculpts is doing anyway -- excusing themselves for refusing to live like other people or be like them.

Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it.

Normal people do not create art.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

I can't wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it. At the moment if I did certain things people would look at it, consider it and then say "f off". But after a while you can get away with things.

A citizen sticks to conventions, does whatever is social. Artists, of course, must reject all conventions. I see no differently in reconciling the best of both of these worlds.

I think that certainly the artists of the '40s, '50s and '60s were fighting a very conformist society, which didn't give them enough space to live or create, and they were bucking all kinds of spoken and unspoken rules.

My mum is an artist and very into creative expression and freedom.

Art is the most beautiful of all lies.

What makes a good work of art is something that honors certain traditions and breaks with others.

There's such a freedom about being an artist... You're not accountable - you're this renegade thing.

I really love art and I always have in every single different form and I just hope that I'm able to give some art that will touch some people and help them to be more positive and stronger.

Poets and painters are outside the class system, or rather they constitute a special class of their own, like the circus people and the Gypsies.

It is an artist's duty to be on the wrong end of the see-saw.

It is fatal for art if it is forced into official respectability and condemned to sterile mediocrity.

I hope I will always have the ability to create art and live in a world where I can speak freely, and I can inspire people. I don't know what form that will take.

I think as much as possible, an artist, if he has any kind of social or political concern, has to…expose as much as possible what he sees so that some people think about things that they don’t normally think about… [Art] should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.

Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.

Art does not imitate nature, but founds itself on the study of nature, takes from nature the selections which best accord with its own intention, and then bestows on them that which nature does not possess, viz: The mind and soul of man.

Art isn't about following the rules. It's about breaking them.

All art is based on non-conformity.

I feel dance and pop music genres are extremely female and extremely gay. When it comes to art and pop culture, queers are f - king weirdos. We don't have gender rules that tell us what we can and can't be. We just make it up as we go along. We have full creative license to be whatever we want to be.

God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth

I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: The world of art is the only such realm.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.