Artistic Paradox Quotes

I believe that a truly valuable artist must be an artist who realizes the impossibility of his task -and then continues to do it.

It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.

Try to think of writing as a gift - more complexly put: it is the curse and the cure.

My work is really abject and self-effacing sometimes. I mean, it's big and overwrought, but it's just paper dolls, and it's kind of silly.

The Public Theater requires one to be very public, and writing requires one to be very private.

We know that Las Vegas is junk, but at the same time I think that exactly the same process and ultimately also, perhaps the same logic, attaches itself to or underlies our masterpieces. We live in an amazing era when in spite of an absence of masters there is an explosion of masterpieces.

...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

For millennia, artists and mystics have pondered the question of how to represent that which, by definition, cannot or must not be represented.

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.

An artist is only an artist on condition that he neglects no aspect of his dual nature. This dualism is the power of being oneself and someone else at one and the same time.

A face painted in a picture gives a pitiful parody of life. . . but a painted surface lives.

A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.

Strange mystery of our nature, that those in whom genius develops itself in imagination, thus taking its most ethereal form, should yet be the most dependent on the opinions of others!

I don't talk about feelings, but I write a lot about feelings. Reading, that's feminine; writing, that's feminine. It is insane - it's really insane - but it still is in me.

I think, to be a successful author, you've got to be part recluse and part show-off.

I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: The world of art is the only such realm.

Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us.

Art is an affirmation of life, a rebuttal of death. And here we blunder into paradox again, for during the creation of any form of art, art which affirms the value and the holiness of life, the artist must die. To serve a work of art, great or small, is to die, to die to self.

What a beautiful art, but what a wretched profession.

What does art mean to me? I never really think about the 'meaning' of art. Yet, obviously, that's what I do.

No one wants my painting because it is different from other people's peculiar, crazy public that demands the greatest possible degree of originality on the painter's part and yet won't accept him unless his work resembles that of the others!

Batty as it sounds, subject and style may choose artists, through some unfathomable cosmic means. How else to explain that even artists who enjoy what they do can be perplexed or even horrified that they're doing it?

Jazz vision is the fusion of music and art a real paradox of same-yet different. Here we play in exchanges, like the hardness of the key of c# major and from the softness of Db major - capturing, reflecting and improvising.