Albert Camus Quotes

After six or seven performances of any song, you begin to perform it rather than feel it.

I think colors are miraculous. We live in a universe that is extremely creative and magical. We become happier as we appreciate these things in nature.

I like all different kinds of music. I never heavily molded myself after rappers. Sometimes they say when you think something and you go to say it, you lose a lot of color about what you're trying to say, so to me the best rappers are the people that don't lose that color.

You couldn't pretend you had lost nothing... you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants.

Beauty inspires me - beauty in nature, people, and art. Smells and fragrances too. I know it sounds weird, but I'm a "fume head." I'm very olfactory-driven.

Stale is stale and borrowed is borrowed, no matter how original your models may have been.

Movies which set out to be 'commercial' usually have an artificial look about them-a certain waxlike quality. They allow for no failure, no moment of mistake.

The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.

How have you left the ancient love That bards of old enjoyed in you! The languid strings do scarcely move! The sound is forced, the notes are few!

Steeping my life in beauty brings color to my days and a song to my heart

And often the worst thing wasn't the victims--they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen. (Mystic River)

You have lost all delight in life. Ahead is a large array of blind alleys. You are half-deliberately, half-desperately cutting off your grip on creative life. You are becoming a neuter machine. You cannot love, even if you knew how to begin to love. Every thought is a devil, a hell-if you could do a lot of things over again, ah, how differently you would do them! You want to go home, back to the womb. You watch the world bang door after door in your face, numbly, bitterly. You have forgotten the secret you knew, once, ah, once, of being joyous, of laughing, of opening doors.

We become intoxicated with color, with words that speak of color, and with the sun that makes colors brighter.

Of all God's gifts to the sighted man, color is holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.

Affected simplicity is a subtle imposture.

All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.

Obviously VIA DOLOROSA is completely artificial. It is as highly wrought as any of my plays. But basically all the artifice is to disguise itself so you don't feel it's there. You're attempting to make the artifice like a pane of glass that simply leads you through to the subject - not to decorate the bloody glass.

It is remarkable indeed how we human beings are capable of delighting in the mating call of a flower while we are surrounded by the charred carcasses of our fellow animals.

the psyche has been burned and left us senseless, the world has been darker than lights-out in a closet full of hungry bats, and the whiskey and wine entered our veins when blood was too weak to carry on

Violence up close has a smell. Like copper blood and charcoal burning.

When we think we don't like art it is because it is artificial art.

Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.

Some young people do not sufficiently understand the advantages of natural charms, and how much they would gain by trusting to them entirely. They weaken these gifts of heaven, so rare and fragile, by affected manners and an awkward imitation. Their tones and their gait are borrowed; they study their attitudes before the glass until they have lost all trace of natural manner, and, with all their pains, they please but little.

I must confess I am a fop in my heart; ill customs influence my very senses, and I have been so used to affectation that without the help of the air of the court what is natural cannot touch me.