Painting throughout its history has served many purposes, has been flat and has used perspective, has been framed and has been lef...t borderless, has been explicit and has been mysterious. But one act of faith has remained a constant.... The act of faith consisted in believing that the visible contained hidden secrets, that to study the visible was to learn something more than could be seen in a glance.... Jackson Pollock was driven by a despair which was partly his and partly that of the times which nourished him, to refuse this act of faith: to insist, with all his brilliance as a painter, that there was nothing behind, that there was only that which was done to the canvas on the side facing us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and... rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the world is a precipitation of human nature, so to speak, then the divine world is a sublimation of the same. Both occur in on...e act. No precipitation without sublimation. What goes lost there in agility, is won here.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have witnessed, and greatly enjoyed, the first act of everything which Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so p...owerful that one act was quite sufficient; whenever I have witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted; and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Is there any place on land or sea where there is no war?... Blackout. Blackout. Blackout. Blackout. Everywhere people stumblin' in... the dark. Is there to be no more light in the world? Is there no place in this dark land where a man who's drunk can find a decent bit of fun?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every time we get near the land you get that look on your face. When a man goes to sea, he ought to give up thinking about things ...on shore. Land don't want him no more. I've had me share of things go wrong and all come from the land. Now I'm through with the land and the land's through with me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miracul...ous flushes, or short-circuits of reasoning. In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain, of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness. The diver vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having de...termined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit.... Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »