Fiction With Art And Artist Quotes & Sayings

Grow up and let anyone try to contend with the adult you. — Margaret Cho

Do you know how hard it is to paint kindness?" She leaned her hip against a desk in the corner of the room, still watching me. "It's the only part of a person I really want to capture. Everything else seems to get lost in layers of deception or defensiveness. But not kindness. You can't hide it. And people either are or they aren't. — Laura Anderson Kurk

I want to paint something that no one has ever painted before," he was saying. I almost laughed at that -- doesn't every artist? We are all touched, however lightly, by the finger of god, and long to be gods ourselves, bringing forth new creations, and yet, so very few achieve it. Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Titian. We stumble in their footsteps, and wait at the closed door. — Mary F. Burns

So, little by little, time brings out each several thing into view, and reason raises it up into the shores of light. — Lucretius

Jo told me once that she was an old woman everywhere but in her studio. "There I'm only myself," she'd said. Standing in the middle of masterpieces that only Jo had ever seen and touched, I knew what she meant. — Laura Anderson Kurk

The trouble with science fiction is that you can write about everything: time, space, all the future, all the past, all of the universe, any kind of creature imaginable. That's too big. It provides no focus for the artist. An artist needs, in order to function, some narrowing of focus. Usually, in the history of art, the narrower the focus in which the artist is forced to work, the greater the art. — Philip J. Klass

It's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's — Samuel R. Delany

A steampunk nation
Baby pollution rises up then the loving comes arraigning 'cause
Our art's official and only partially artificial
And our heart's in the middle of sharp hardened shards of metal but
There's not where it settles
Because it's beating to the steaming of God's hottest pot or kettle
And now we face it, this creation we made to
To save our craving for a synthetic rebelnation it's
Our safeway they make into a pathetic revelation
In our steampunk nation
Our steampunk nation — Criss Jami

How we educate the mind will change with the times; how we cultivate the heart is and will remain timeless. — Basil Moreau

My theory is that the purpose of art is to transmit universal truths of a sort, but of a particular sort, that in art, whether it's poetry, fiction or painting, you are telling the reader or listener or viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition. And so, what the artist does, or tries to do, is simply to validate the human experience and to tell people the deep human truths which they already unconsciously know. — Walker Percy

What you call your lies are fiction and myths. The art of creating a disguise can be as beautiful as the creation of a painting ... I created a woman for my artist life, bold, gay, courageous, generous, fearless; and another to please my father, a clear-sighted woman with a love of beauty, harmony, and self-discipline, critical and selective; and still another who lives in chaos, embraces the weak and the stumbling and the confused. — Anais Nin

She knew better: when artistry seems most elusive is when you must focus, dig deep, and force yourself to think about how to give form to an idea that seems too vague to express. — Maryanne O'Hara

What we remember lacks the hard edge of fact. To help us along we create little fictions, highly subtle and individual scenarios which clarify and shape our experience. The remembered event becomes a fiction, a structure made to accommodate certain feelings. This is obvious to me. If it weren't for these structures, art would be too personal for the artist to create, much less for the audience to grasp. Even film, the most literal of all the arts, is edited. - Jerzy Kosinski — Erica Jong

She smiled a little, and there was effortful lightness in her voice when she asked, "And how would you know what darkness is like?" Her hand brushed his feathers and they sparked to her touch. "You are your own light."
And Akiva almost said, I know what darkness is, because he did, in all the worst senses of the word, but he didn't want Karou to think he was retreating to the bleak state she'd drawn him out of in Morocco. So he held his tongue and was glad he had when she added, so softly he nearly didn't hear, "And mine. — Laini Taylor

No one in Cattaraugus had much idea of what an artist' colony might be. "Art" itself was viewed with suspicion, scorn. There was the sense, as people like my mother conveyed it, of a fraud, a hustle. "Art" was putting something over on someone, the way politicians did. "Art" was a sorry excuse for not being productive, useful. "Art" was vanity, pretension. — Lauren Kelly

Everyone who says hello, will one day say goodbye; sometimes without a warning, or give a reason why ... — Donna M. Zadunajsky

He thought, that all men, trickled away, changing constantly, until they finally dissolved, while the artist-created images remained unchangeably the same. He thought that the fear of death was perhaps the root of all art, perhaps also of all things of the mind. We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do. Perhaps the woman after whom the master shaped his beautiful Madonna is already wilted or dead, and soon he, too, will be dead; others will live in his house and eat at his table- but his work will still be standing hundreds of years from now, and longer. It will go on shimmering in the quiet cloister church, unchangingly beautiful, forever smiling with the same sad, flowering mouth. — Hermann Hesse

We believe that only government has the capacity
not to mention the political and moral responsibility
to promote the general welfare.
Father Kramer as quoted in Sweet Charity? — Janet Poppendieck

I feel like a sailor, or better, like an explorer of the immense universe of art. The artist is a discoverer in search of the keys that open the door to emotions and feelings . Art is the place where rationality, fantasy, truth and fiction mix up in a detonating mixture. — Augusto De Luca

Any artist is insulted by the suggestion that art is merely a matter of recording reality, and knows that it is impossible to explain how imagination can transform not only events and people, but the artist as well, into quite different "realities". — Joan Lindsay

See, the institutions and specialist, experts, you see. Yes, yes,
experts, indeed. See, they would have us believe that there is an order
to art. An explanation. Humans are odd creatures in that way. Always
searching for a formula. Yes, a formula to create an expected norm for
unexplainable greatness. A cook book you might say. Yes, a recipe
book for life, love, and art. However, my dear, let me tell you. Yes,
there is no such thing. Every individual is unique in their own design,
as intended by God himself. We classify, yes, always must we classify,
for if not, then we would be lost, yes lost now wouldn't we?
Classification, order, expectations, but alas, we forget. For what is art,
if not the out word expression of an artist. It is the soul of the artisan
and if his expectations are met, than who are we to judge whether his
work be art or not? — Cristina Marrero

Watch now," Handful told her. "This rabbit goes under the log, and this rabbit goes over the log. You make them hop like that all the way down. See, that's how you make a plait - hop over, hop under." Nina took possession of the rabbits and the log and created a remarkably passable braid. Handful and I oohed and ahhed as if she'd carved a Florentine statue. It was a winter evening like so many others that passed in quiet predictability: the room flushed with lamplight, a fire nesting on the grate, an early dark flattening against the windows, while my two companions fussed over me at the dresser. — Sue Monk Kidd

Like my dick at the thought of my wife, I don't want to get up. — Logan Ryan Smith

It's neither and it's both. That's the perfect kind of art. Labels only detract from the artist's intention. — Ted Dekker