What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someoneβs company you love them.
Iris MurdochRead
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
Interpretation
Great art stimulates the mind and spirit but does not provide comfort or reassurance.
Iris Murdoch suggests that the highest form of artistic expression possesses the ability to provoke thought and inspire action, rather than merely offering solace or emotional comfort. This implies that true artistic greatness lies in its power to challenge viewers, forcing them to confront deeper realities rather than escaping into reassuring fantasies.
In practice
In a discussion about modern art at a gallery opening, you could use this quote to emphasize the provocative nature of the artwork displayed.
What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someoneβs company you love them.
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
Sometimes when you're inside a story, it's almost better if you don't think too much about its wider cultural significance or if you don't think about how audiences might react to it. That takes you out of the reality of the situation you're committing to as you're telling the story.
I'm singing what I want to sing based on the emotion of what that day feels like. That's what comes out of my mouth and guitar. That impacts people. They know anything can happen.
Chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind and are then refined and improved by experience.
When I have to score a film, I watch the movie first and then start thinking about it. And from that moment on, it is as if I were pregnant. I then have to deliver the child, so from that moment on, I think always about the music - even when I go to the grocery store, I think about it.
The magic of the music seems to light the way.
The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement
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