William Butler Yeats Quotes

Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it.

A citizen sticks to conventions, does whatever is social. Artists, of course, must reject all conventions. I see no differently in reconciling the best of both of these worlds.

The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.

I think that certainly the artists of the '40s, '50s and '60s were fighting a very conformist society, which didn't give them enough space to live or create, and they were bucking all kinds of spoken and unspoken rules.

Tradition is the great misleader because it's too easy to follow what has already been done - even though you may think you're giving it a kick. I was really trying to invent, instead of merely expressing myself.

If you're always thinking about someone else's work, about the tradition you're working in, how can you possibly make anything good?

Controversial proposals, once accepted, soon become hallowed.

Tradition" is very often an excuse word for people who don't want to change.

I hate good taste. It's the worst thing that can happen to a creative person.

In a moment when criticism shows a singular dearth of direction every man has to be a law unto himself in matters of theatre, writing, and painting. While the American Mercury and the new Ford continue to spread a thin varnish of Ritz over the whole United States there is a certain virtue in being unfashionable.

Just because something is traditional is no reason to do it, of course.

It is an artist's duty to be on the wrong end of the see-saw.

A lot of people just capitulate and say, "Well, that's just the way things are." I think that can be deadly for creative people.

The fear of being different prevents most people from seeking new ways to solve their problems.

Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?

Composers aren't daring enough. They're afraid of that sacred idol called 'common sense', which is the most dreadful thing I know - after all, it's no more than a religion founded to excuse the ubiquity of imbeciles!

Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I’m telling a story! Oh, that can’t be the case, because I’m a clever person. I’m a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I’ll write Ulysses.”

Each human being is unique, each with their own qualities, instincts, forms of pleasure, and desire for adventure. However, society always imposes on us a collective ways of behaving, and people never stop to wonder why they should behave like that. They just accept it, the way typists accepted the fact that the QWERTY keyboard was the best possible one. Have you ever met anyone is your entire life who asked why the hands of a clock should go in one particular direction and not the other?

All art is based on non-conformity.

Tradition implies authority, conformity, imitation, following.

Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.

... maybe that's all anyone who writes or paints or sculpts is doing anyway -- excusing themselves for refusing to live like other people or be like them.

We as visual artists need to continue to be renegades and say, "Yes I am here to do a project, but what is the social service?"

And in not learning the rules, I was free. I always say, you're either defined by the medium or you redefine the medium in terms of your needs.

Custom is a violent and treacherous school mistress. She, by little and lithe, slyly and unperceived, slips in the foot of her authority; but having by this gentle and humble beginning, with the benefit of time, fixed and established it, she then unmasks a furious and tyrannic countenance, against which we have no more the courage or the power so much as to lift up our eyes.