Artistic Futility Quotes

All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Do not strive to be a modern artist: it's the one thing, unfortunately, you can't help being.

ART Art is that thing having to do only with itself—the product of a successful attempt to make a work of art. Unfortunately, there are no expamples of art, nor good reasons to think that it will ever exist. (Everything that has been made has been made with a purpose, teverything with an end exists outside of that thing, i.e., "I want to sell this", or "I want this to make me famous and loved", or "I want this to make me whole", or worse, "I want this to make others whole.") And yet we continue to write, paint, sculpt and compose. Is this foolish of us?

Poetry is a mug's game.

Writers end up writing stories-or rather, stories' shadows-and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough

When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all.

Writing is very castrating in the moment. Fiction in general, it has no function, nobody asks for it.

Someone called actors 'sculptors in snow.' Very apt. In the end, it's all nothing.

The hardest part about acting is realizing it doesn't matter.

You can't possibly predict what will last or not. But once you attempt to write for the ages, you're doomed.