Man, became man through work, who stepped out of the animal kingdom as transformer of the natural into the artificial, who became ...therefore the magician, man the creator of social reality, will always stay the great magician, will always be Prometheus bringing fire from heaven to earth, will always be Orpheus enthralling nature with his music. Not until humanity itself dies will art die.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social functio...n, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life baffles and seems almost to mock. It refuses long to remain consistently one thing or another and it seldom puts us into one ...mood without violating it soon after. But Art, seeming to have for human dignity a respect which Life consistently lacks, grants us at least our right to sorrow fully and freely when sorrow is called for or to laugh our laugh out when laughter is appropriate. The artist selects and classifies what nature mingles in a hideous confusion and in doing so he is, in one of his many ways, adapting the universe to our minds by presenting it in an order which our emotions can follow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Obviously, where art has it over life is in the matter of editing. Life can be seen to suffer from a drastic lack of editing. It s...tops too quick, or else it goes on too long. Worse, its pacing is erratic. Some chapters are little more than a few sentences in length, while others stretch into volumes. Life, for all its raw talent, has little sense of structure. It creates amazing textures, but it can't be counted on for snappy beginnings or good endings either. Indeed, in many cases no ending is provided at all. The kind of work that Maxwell Perkins did for Thomas Wolfe, or more recently, that Verna Fields did for Stephen Spielberg, doesn't get done in life. Even in a literary age like the nineteenth century it never occurred to anyone to posit God as Editor, useful as the metaphor might have been.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control o...ver what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was born to be an editor, I always edit everything. I edit my room at least once a week. Hotels are made for me. I can change a ...hotel room so thoroughly that even its proprietor doesn't recognize it.... I edit people's clothes, dressing them infallibly in the right lines.... I change everyone's coiffure--except those that please me--and these I gaze at with such satisfaction that I become suspect, I edit people's tones of voice, their laughter, their words. I change their gestures, their photographs. I change the books I read, the music I hear ... It's this incessant, unavoidable observation, this need to distinguish and impose, that has made me an editor. I can't make things. I can only revise what has been made.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... laws haven't the slightest interest for me--except in the world of science, in which they are always changing; or in the world... of art, in which they are unchanging; or in the world of Being in which they are, for the most part, unknown.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Art to me was a state, it didn't need to be an accomplishment. By any of the standards of production, achievement, performance, I ...was not an artist. But I always thought of myself as one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have always rebelled against the unadorned, the unbefitting, the unawakened, the unresisting, the undesirable, the unplanned, th...e unshapely, the uncommitted, the unattempted--all leading to the unintended. I believe in the unsubmissive, the unfaltering, the unassailable, the irresistible, the unbelievable--in other words, in an art of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »