Janet Malcolm Quotes

Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.

Copy nature and you infringe on the work of our Lord. Interpret nature and you are an artist.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

All artists are anarchists in some way - some more extreme than others, but it's something that I think artists are supposed to do. We're supposed to present a different angle on everything, and I certainly think it is [art] as much as poetry, in my opinion.

Sure, I can talk like you, but I choose not to, It's like an art, you know? Picasso had to prove to the world he could paint the right way, before he goes putting both eyes on the side of a face... See if you paint wrong because that's the best you can do, you just a chump. But you do it because you want to? Then you're an artist...You can take that to the grave and dig it up when you need it.

All art is based on non-conformity.

Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.

Don't be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

I will preach with my brush.

Art revolves around creating something that isn't there.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

I never set out to make a movie that was everything to everybody; if that were the case, we could all just take a picture of a tree and agree that the tree is beautiful and move on with our lives. I wouldn't even need to show up.

You can't just take an image and randomly distort it and call it art - although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that.

Art has always been and is in its very essence the boldest departure from nature. It is the bridge into the spirit world.

Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion.

In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.

Art requires, above all things, a suppression of self, a subordination of one's self to an idea.

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

Craft can get you through ninety percent of a piece, but it's art that carries you at the end.

Art = a mad search for individualism.

Art is the expression of imagination, not the reproduction of reality.

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

I don't *ever* write about real people. Art is supposed to be better than that. If you want a slice of life, look out the window.

Isn't art about breaking rules, about challenging existing systems, isn't it about discovering meaning in things or situations before others see anything in them??