Aesthetic Challenge Quotes

Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.

Great art stretches the taste, it doesn't follow tastes.

Writing means not just staring ugliness in the face, but finding a way to embrace it.

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.

I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.

Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano.

I have sometimes been told that my music is 'difficult' for the listener.

It's been hard for me to nail visual language and personal style because I like so many different things.

I believe that the problem of how you depict something is a formal problem. It's an interesting one and it's a permanent one; there's no solution to it. There are a thousand and one ways you can go about it. There's no set rule.

My films can be considered political action against the tyranny of good taste.

The more horrific works came out of a feeling that everyone accepted my stuff too easily. I was deliberately trying to be antagonistic towards collectors and critics.

Design doesn't have to be daunting. Some people really find it challenging to take on their entire home, because they don't know their aesthetic; they don't know where they want to go.