Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

What one person might see as violent, someone else may see as beautiful. Maybe even art.

Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you're missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think.

Style is objective, akin to art, so it varies.

I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.

I guess the role of art is to make something that is ambiguous and complex.

Art is a never-ending dance of illusions.

There is no adequate definition for creative writing, any more than it is possible to describe pain or flavor or color.

All records are riddles, and whatever you may want people to think it's about, it may just be throwing them off. And you don't want it to get in the way of what someone else's understanding is. It's not really about anything. At the same time, it will find some meaning.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?

People criticized me for my photography. They said it's not art.

I think art is more glorious than life but not more real.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

Sometimes people only see horrible, terrible things in my paintings.

But however measurable, there is much more life in music than mathematics or logic ever dreamed of.

I'm really interested in the nondefinitive element of abstraction.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

There are no actions involved in 'beautiful.' It's such an inactive thing, and it's so subject to each individual's taste and appreciation. It's a lovely word, but I feel like it's been hijacked by really boring, dull people who don't understand how to use words.

I think my life has been transformed by the ability to take things that exist in the world and look at them more closely. I think that's what art does at its best: it allows us to slow down.

For me, music is pure abstraction.

Art is the right hand of Nature.

Art's the biggest vanity: the assumption that one's view of peace or fright or beauty is permanently communicable.

The beautiful is a phenomenon which is never apparent of itself, but is reflected in a thousand different works of the creator.