F. Sionil Jose Quotes

I agree that Ruskin has done much harm to counter balance much good in giving people the trick of talking about Art instead of really doing a little of it to enable them to understand.

I know that the arts are important. I'm not denying that, but I can't associate myself with all the claptrap that goes on around it.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.

I don't often go to curator or artist walk-throughs of exhibitions. For a critic, it feels like cheating. I want to see shows with my own eyes, making my own mistakes, viewing exhibitions the way most of their audience sees them.

I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

Few people in contemporary art demonstrate much curiosity. The majority spend their days blathering on, rather than trying to work out why one artist is more interesting than another, or why one picture works and another doesn't.

When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

Charles Saatchi has never liked my work at all.

The difference between me and, say, the opera critic is that I'm charged with thinking about the world beyond opera. I could go see 'Die Fledermaus', for instance. I've never done any of this, by the way. I've never written about one opera since I've had this job.

What I've really liked doing is combining what you might call art criticism or music criticism with something that is happening in real life.

I tried without much success to learn a little of the humanities and the arts, but even passing the courses in art history and music history was a challenge.

It's difficult sometimes to go and see a show and enjoy it and not go and see a show and critique it.

The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about, or even looking at.

Wit has as few true judges as painting.

I get a great laugh from artists who ridicule the critics as parasites and artists manqués — sucha horrible joke. I can’t imagine a more perfect art form, a moreperfect career than criticism. I can’t imagine anything more valuableto do.

The place of the arts in the classroom is essential in encouraging invention, ambition, and an understanding of the importance and pleasures of living an examined life.

I ought to warn you that my verse is of no interest to people who can think.

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.