Terry Pratchett Quotes

If art reflects life, it does so with special mirrors.

Life imitates art -- but badly.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

It is, in fact, safe to assume that, more often than not, life imitates craft, for who among us can say that our experience does not more closely resemble a macramé plant holder than it does a painting by Seurat. When it comes to art, life is the biggest copycat in the matter of the frame.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.

When I write I don't aim to shock people, and I'm surprised when I do. But I don't think that anything that occurs in life should be omitted from art, though the artist should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly. I set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking.

I feel like art imitates life and life imitates art.

All my art is in some way about other art, even if the other art is cartoons.

Nothing reveals more about the inner life of a people than their arts.

Art remains the one way possible of speaking truth.

In art, one does not aim for simplicity; one achieves it unintentionally as one gets closer to the real meaning of things.

Poetry looking in the mirror sees art, and art looking in a mirror sings poetry.

A work of art is something produced by a person, but is not that person — it is of her, but is not her. It’s a reach, really — the artist is trying to inhabit, temporarily, a more compact, distilled, efficient, wittier, more true-seeing, precise version of herself — one that she can’t replicate in so-called ‘real’ life, no matter how hard she tries. That’s why she writes: to try and briefly be more than she truly is.

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

All good art cannot help but confront denial on its way to truth.

The only principle in art is to copy what you see. Dealers in aesthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal.

All good art is about something deeper than it admits.

I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself

I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory -- a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth.

Perhaps the least cheering statement ever made on the subject of art is that life imitates it.

Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.