Kenneth Clark Quotes

In every artist there is poetry. In every human being there is the poetic element. We know, we feel, we believe.

My paintings are reflections of my own inner mysteries... they all reflect my relationship to my steadiest of companions and muses - nature and animals.

I wish to share and pass down some of my generation's traits, and encourage young people to create their own art, music, and literature.

The poet existed among the cave men; he will exist among men of the atomic age, for he is an inherent part of man. Even religions have been born from the need for poetry, which is a spiritual need, and it is through the grace of poetry that the divine spark lives forever in the human flint.

Anybody who dedicates himself to exploring the human condition, there's always a detached eye that's watching. In any situation, a little part of me is observing it, to see if there are any raw materials to create something else later.

The trouble is, once you say something about a source, then you've pegged it down, and so now I'm reluctant to say anything. If I say I developed 50 different shapes from Mississippian tumuli, that doesn't mean they're copies of tumuli - I'm not ripping off those shapes.

Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.

I would certainly never consider myself a Renaissance Man; I'm not fit to look at the dust from the chariot wheels of many of those who have gone before me.

Art is a primal need - even under siege, especially under siege.

I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly.

Those works whose ideal has not as much living reality and, as it were, personality as the beloved one or a friend had better remain unwritten. They would at least never become works of art.

I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.

Civilization is very fragile, all it takes is a few decades of chaos for us to forget humanity and turn into animals. Our base natures can take over very fast. We can forget that we are sentient beings, with laws and codes and ethics.

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

A man who has not suffered has nothing to tell with his paintings.

Art is one of the sources through which the soul expresses itself and inspires others. But to express art thoroughly, one must have the inner emotions opened thoroughly.

The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.

Kaz's wilder work captures the great beauty of the human heart and the natural world.

All important things in art have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being.

All emotions are the ore from which poetry may be sifted.

Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square; but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion.

Steve Yarbrough is a writer of many gifts, but what makes Safe from the Neighbors such a magnificent achievement is its moral complexity. . . . Safe from the Neighbors does what only the best novels can do; after reading it, we can never see the world, or ourselves, in quite the same way.

I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.