Quotes on Art

I have the most openness about my art... It's total freedom and willingness to work. I'm willing really to walk on the edge, and if I haven't achieved it, that's where I want to go. But in my life - maybe because my life has been so traumatic, so absurd - there hasn't been one normal, happy thing.

The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.

I believe that dance is the oldest, noblest and most cogent of the arts. I believe that dance is the most perfect symbol of the activity of God and His angels. I believe that dance has the power to heal, mentally and physically. I believe that true education in the art of dance is education of the whole man.

Art doesn't go to sleep in the bed made for it. It would sooner run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name is.

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

The symbol of all art is the Prism. The goal is unrealism. The method is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism, into the secret glories which it contains.

An artist must forget painting when he paints. That's the only way he will do original work.

THEATRE HAS THE POWER TO MOVE, INSPIRE, TRANSFORM AND EDUCATE IN WAYS THAT NO OTHER ART FORM CAN. THEATRE REFLECTS BOTH THE EXTRAORDINARY DIVERSITY OF CULTURES AND OUR SHARED HUMAN CONDITION, IN ALL ITS VULNERABILITY AND STRENGTH.

If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn.

Dance training can't be separate from life training. Everything that comes into our lives is training. The qualities we admire in great dancing are the same qualities we admire in human beings: honesty, courage, fearlessness, generosity, wisdom, depth, compassion,and humanity.

The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.

There's something arbitrary about taking a picture. So I can stand at the edge of a highway and take one step forward and it can be a natural landscape untouched by man and I can take one step back and include a guardrail and change the meaning of the picture radically... I can take a picture of a person at one moment and make them look contemplative and photograph them two seconds later and make them look frivolous.

He that comes to Christ cannot, it is true, always get on as fast as he would. Poor coming soul, thou art like the man that would ride full gallop whose horse will hardly trot. Now the desire of his mind is not to be judged of by the slow pace of the dull jade he rides on, but by the hitching and kicking and spurring as he sits on his back. Thy flesh is like this dull jade, it will not gallop after Christ, it will be backward though thy soul and heaven lie at stake.

If Watson and I had not discovered the [DNA] structure, instead of being revealed with a flourish it would have trickled out and that its impact would have been far less. For this sort of reason Stent had argued that a scientific discovery is more akin to a work of art than is generally admitted. Style, he argues, is as important as content. I am not completely convinced by this argument, at least in this case.

Real mathematics must be justified as art if it can be justified at all.

To insist on purity is to baptize instinct, to humanize art, and to deify personality.

Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it's our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are.

Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us: like an appreciation of art or poetry, it has to be cultivated. Humanism is itself a religion without God-not all religions, of course, are theistic. Our ethical secular ideal has it's own disciplines of mind and heart and gives people the means of finding faith in the ultimate meaning of human life that were once provided by the more conventional religions.

The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.

I had become wealthy as an art dealer, but my life was never rich until I began serving in a mission and began being blessed by those that were basically hopeless. To see them have hope was the biggest blessing in my life.