Sherwood Anderson Quotes

This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence.

Don't make the mistake of believing it's enough to reproduce the realities of life.... The object of art is to give life a shape, and to do it by every conceivable artifice.

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

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

art is not advocacy and advocacy is not art.

All bad art is the result of good intentions.

I do not know what evil is when it comes to art. I only know what is good art and what is bad art.

All art is bad, but modern art is the worst.

God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth

What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

Realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art.

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.

Cold exactitude is not art... The so-called consciousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring. People like that, if they could, would work with the same minute attention on the back of their canvas.

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.

I was getting tired of hearing the complaint, "My kid could do this," and "We don't get it. What's modern art? Blah, blah, blah." And I wondered what would really happen if you gave people what they wanted, something they always look at.

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

What is painting but the act of embracing, by means of art, the surface of the pool?

In the end nobody knows how it's done — how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.

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.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

I sometimes set myself thinking and imagining that I find amongst men but one single art or science, and that is drawing or painting, all others being members proceeding therefrom.