Joseph Campbell Quotes

My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Great art inspires great art.

Shakespeare and Rembrandt have in common the faculty of quickening speculation and compelling the minds of men to combat and discussion.

In my own life, I share my home with works by artists like Elizabeth Murray, Martin Puryear, Jackie Windsor and so many others, whose creativity is clear and fresh and compelling; the works break through the usual, and they inspire creativity; they inspire responses and understanding.

Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.

I get some flak for and some resistance from colleagues for because I'm interested in storytelling. I mean what I like about songwriting is songs used to tell a story.

I've always really been interested in the Pygmalion myth and both what it has to say about creativity and what it has to say about relationships between men and women. I'd been thinking about what I would want to do with that if I was going to write on that theme, and one morning I woke up and Calvin and Ruby Sparks were in my head.

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

As an actress, you're living something through the duration of the play and its geography. I've always seen writing the same way. It's like somehow I'm moving through the terrain of the book as a performer.

The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.

It's art that's taught me to think and to write.

When I look at great works of art or listen to inspired music, I sense intimate portraits of the specific times in which they were created.

Human requirements are the inspiration for art.

Whenever we witness art in a building, we are aware of an energy contained by it.

It is our art that has an opportunity to leave a footprint in the sand. They don't wrap fish in our work.

Great art should be shown with great excitement.

Picasso is still influencing me. Of course, I haven't got that kind of energy, or skill.

Crumb was such an influence on me. He's such a visionary, such a great artist, that he so shaped my artistic sensibilities on a certain level that I do owe everything to him. The way I see the world is largely changed by him.

I set my sights upon becoming the kind of artist who would make a contribution to art history.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

I guess I'm drawn to artists and literary people and want to learn about them.