Aesthetic Detachment Quotes

The responsibility of the artist consists in perfecting his work so that it may become attractively disinteresting.

You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one without almost without bothering to read the other.

A certain amount of contempt for the material employed to express an idea is indispensable to the purest realization of this idea.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

I'm always hearing music in terms of what I can take out of it, and I think I've always listened like that. I have a hard time just listening for pleasure. I'm much less about instinct, and more of a utilitarian listener.

The artist has a duty to be calm. He has no right to show his emotion, his involvement, to go pouring it all out at the audience. Any excitement over a subject must be sublimated into an Olympian calm of form. That is the only way in which an artist can tell of the things that excite him.

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.