Quotes by Playwrights - Page 155

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium
Oscar Wilde
Reality is not enough for us, that’s why we have invented art to create different realities!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Art symbolizes our perfect ability in the matter of enriching the reality!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Art is our endless desire to turn the mortal things into the immortal things!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Not only the artist watches his art with admiration but his art also watches his artist with admiration!
Mehmet Murat ildan
To become a work of art is the object of living.
Oscar Wilde
If something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts, art will become sterile and beauty will pass away from the land.
Oscar Wilde
No art is silent! Because art is an original idea and every original idea speaks, every interesting thought screams, every art talks, every art screams! No art is silent! If it is silent, then it is not an art!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You can't live with literary characters no matter how much you might like to. You can have them as imaginary friends that you can call up when you need to. One of the tasks of art is to provide people with companions.
Henning Mankell
In addition, I think religion has a chance of a look-in whenever the mind craves solace in music or poetry-- in any form of art at all. Personally, I think it is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communication all the other arts attempt.
Dodie Smith
Schelling's God is the totality of Nature struggling towards consciousness, and Man is as far as the struggle has got, with the animals not too far behind, vegetables somewhat lagging, and rocks nowhere as yet. Do we believe this? Does it matter? Think of it as a poem or a painting. Art doesn't have to be true like a theorem. It can be true in other ways. This truth says there is a meaning to it all, and Man is where the meaning begins to show.
Tom Stoppard
The greatest events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow out in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion. We reject the burden of their memory, and have anodynes against them. But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us.
Oscar Wilde
Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.
LeRoi Jones
Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself
Oscar Wilde
Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light. Dante reserved a place in his Inferno for those who wilfully live in sadness - sullen in the sweet air, he says. Your 'honour' is all shame and timidity and compliance. Pure of stain! But the artist is the secret criminal in our midst. He is the agent of progress against authority. you are right to be a scholar. A scholar is all scruple, an artist is none. The artist must lie, cheat, deceive, be untrue to nature and contemptuous of history. I made my life into my art and it was an unqualified success. The blaze of my immolation threw its light into every corner of the land where uncounted young men sat each in his own darkness. What would I have done in Megara!? - think what I would have missed! I awoke the imagination of the century. I banged Ruskin's and Pater's heads together, and from the moral severity of one and the aesthetic soul of the other I made art a philosophy that can look the twentieth century in the eye. I had genius, brilliancy, daring, I took charge of my own myth. I dipped my staff into the comb of wild honey. I tasted forbidden sweetness and drank the stolen waters. I lived at the turning point of the world where everything was waking up new - the New Drama, the New Novel, New Journalism, New Hedonism, New Paganism, even the New Woman. Where were you when all this was happening?
Tom Stoppard
Art creates high energy, high vibrations, high music, high feelings, high of everything! Without art, we leave highness and we meet lowness!
Mehmet Murat ildan
To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote ‘King Lear.
Oscar Wilde
The arts that have escaped [uniformity] best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.
Oscar Wilde
You want to fly? Find an art and watch it carefully!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Paris, however―because of her purely fortuitous beauty, because of the old things which have become a part of her, because of her entanglement of buildings and tenements―Paris yields herself in discovery as an attic beloved in our childhood gave up its secrets.
Jean Cocteau
The dictators, commanders or emperors who want to conquer the world soon realize that the world has already been conquered by the artists and their arts!
Mehmet Murat ildan
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Oscar Wilde
If you want to have a golden signature, create a good art!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The purpose of art is to create heavens to balance the world because there are so many hells in the world, there are wars, tortures and oppressions, there is unhappiness etc.
Mehmet Murat ildan
One of the best ways to recharge is by simply being in the presence of art. No thoughts, no critiques. Just full-on absorption mode.
Dean Francis Alfar
Art is the greatest opportunity to admire the human mind!
Mehmet Murat ildan
[The ruling class] sees people in the working class as being almost animals. It sees itself as being synonymous with civilization and its cultivation as coming from its natural abilities and not from its wealth and privileged opportunities. It doesn't see that the way in which it monopolizes these things distorts the culture it derives from them and that this makes its culture irrational and an enemy of civilization.
Edward Bond
The artist tries to show reason in experience and appearance – and lyric is the daily appearance, the commonplace dress, of reason. It shows us the rational. It makes the epic pattern human. It's the footprint on the pathway. In the epic-lyric the individual and particular are no longer isolated but are placed in a historical, social, human pattern. That's why there's a political way of cutting bread or wearing shoes.
Edward Bond
Because art is a scream, even when it hides itself somewhere, you will find it!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Let us salute all the shadows of this world for the brilliant and enigmatical art they create day and night!
Mehmet Murat ildan
One can show one's contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the world by making of one's life a poem of incoherence and absurdity.
Alfred Jarry
You think that I am naive, but it is you who are naive. You have no idea what is happening inside of you when you look at a painting. You think that you are getting close to art voluntarily, enticed by its beauty, that this intimacy is taking place in an atmosphere of freedom and that delight is being born in you spontaneously, lured by the divine rod of Beauty. In truth, a hand has grabbed you by the scruff of the neck, led you to this painting and has thrown you to your knees. A will mightier than your own told you to attempt to experience the appropriate emotions. Whose hand and whose will? That hand is not the hand of a single man, the will is collective, born in an interhuman dimension, quite alien to you. So you do not admire at all, you merely try to admire.
Witold Gombrowicz
Saturday-morning cartoon sure aren't what they used to be. The animation is lazy. Too clean. He misses being able to detect pencil lines and paint strokes in his favorite cartoon characters, his mind never quite separating the creatures from the art that brought them to life.
Kara Lee Corthron
You want to feel that you belong to something higher, to something even beyond this universe, then go to the opera!
Mehmet Murat ildan
An artist is a man who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to find a general objective meaning in them, and how to express them in a convincing form.
Maxim Gorky
An educated person's ideas of Art are drwan naturally from what Art has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends.
Oscar Wilde
Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming about him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists give everything to their art, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in themselves. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures.
Oscar Wilde
With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.
Peter Weiss
I am constantly reminded that we human beings are basically storytellers. More homo narrans than Homo sapiens. We see ourselves in others' stories. Every genuine work of art contains a small fragment of glass from a mirror.
Henning Mankell
To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today.
Witold Gombrowicz
The art historians are the real wreckers of art, Reger said. The art historians twaddle so long about art until they have killed it with their twaddle. Art is killed by the twaddle of the art historians. My God, I often think, sitting here on the settee while the art historians are driving their helpless flocks past me, what a pity about all these people who have all art driven out of them, driven out of them for good, by these very art historians. The art historians’ trade is the vilest trade there is, and a twaddling art historian, but then there are only twaddling art historians, deserves to be chased out with a whip, chased out of the world of art, Reger said, all art historians deserve to be chased out of the world of art, because art historians are the real wreckers of art and we should not allow art to be wrecked by the art historians who are really art wreckers. Listening to an art historian we feel sick, he said, by listening to an art historian we see the art he is twaddling about being ruined, with the twaddle of the art historian art shrivels and is ruined. Thousands, indeed tens of thousands of art historians wreck art by their twaddle and ruin it, he said. The art historians are the real killers of art, if we listen to an art historian we participate in the wrecking of art, wherever an art historian appears art is wrecked, that is the truth.
Thomas Bernhard
It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.
Oscar Wilde
My liege, and madam, to expostulateWhat majesty should be, what duty is, Why day is day, night night, and time is time,Were nothing but to waste night, day and time.Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,I will be brief.
William Shakespeare
Man screams from the depths of his soul; the whole era becomes a single, piercing shriek. Art also screams, into the deep darkness, screams for help, screams for the spirit. This is Expressionism.
Hermann Bahr
However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins.
Yukio Mishima
We always search for the signature of God to prove His existence. And now I say unto you that Art is His very signature!
Mehmet Murat ildan
There's a point at which when I start to know a man well--this isn't true of women--I wonder whether there's something in him that's evil. Something that's pure and can't be touched. This quality of evil may be related to the quality of artistry, for an artist has the same characteristics.
Kathy Acker
Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.
Oscar Wilde
For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us.
Oscar Wilde
I looked on astounded as from his ordinary life he made his art. We were both ordinary men, he and I. Yet from the ordinary he created Legends--and I from Legends created only the ordinary!
Peter Shaffer
All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.
William Saroyan
It comforted him because it could not be called suffering if it was a sign of Art.
Hermann Bahr
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.All art is quite useless.
Oscar Wilde
So. Lie there, my art.
William Shakespeare
Colors are light's suffering and joy
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The work of art is a stuffed crocodile.
Alfred Jarry
Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.
W Somerset Maugham
Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.
Peter Shaffer
The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother’s milk and blackens it to make printer’s ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal women with. He pretends to spare her the pangs of child-bearing so that he may have for himself the tenderness and fostering that belong of right to her children. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a blood-sucker, a hypocrite, and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy! For mark you, Tavy, the artist’s work is to shew us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men. In the rage of that creation he is as ruthless as the woman, as dangerous to her as she to him, and as horribly fascinating. Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman. Which shall use up the other? that is the issue between them. And it is all the deadlier because, in your romanticist cant, they love one another.
George Bernard Shaw
Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.
Oscar Wilde