When we speak, in gestures or signs, we fashion a real object in the world; the gesture is seen, the words and the song are heard.... The arts are simply a kind of writing, which, in one way or another, fixes words or gestures, and gives body to the invisible.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 »
Undoubtedly ... there is a meanness in all the arts which ladies sometimes condescend to employ for captivation. What bears affini...ty to cunning is despicable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the bru...te.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point... of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting--the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What would life be without art? Science prolongs life. To consist of what--eating, drinking, and sleeping? What is the good of liv...ing longer if it is only a matter of satisfying the requirements that sustain life? All this is nothing without the charm of art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author...--detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower's pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl's lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »