Artist Quotes (page 52)
All alone, or in two's, The ones who really love you. Walk up and down outside the wall. Some hand in hand. And some gathered together in bands. The bleeding hearts and artists. Make their stand. And when they've given you their all. Some stagger and fall, after all it's not easy. Banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall.
Roger Waters
Delacroix was passionately in love with passion... The man himself was an intense passion, supported by a formidable will power.
He used to say constantly:
'Since I consider the impression transmitted to the artist by nature as the most important thing to translate, is it not necessary that he be armed in advance with all the speediest means of translation?'
Charles Baudelaire
That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.
H. P. Lovecraft
Yet entertainment--as I define it, pleasure and all--remains the only sure means we have of bridging, or at least of feeling as if we have bridged, the gulf of consciousness that separates each of us from everybody else. The best response to those who would cheapen and exploit it is not to disparage or repudiate but to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences, a two-way exchange of attention, experience, and the universal hunger for connection.
Michael Chabon
The male frog in mating season," said Crake, "makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs—it's been documented—discover if they position themselves in empty drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier and the small frog appears much larger than it really is."
So?"
So that's what art is for the artist, an empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at...
Margaret Atwood
Modern man has been in search of a new language of form to satisfy new longings and aspirations - longings for mental appeasement, aspirations to unity, harmony, serenity - an end to his alienation from nature. All these arts of remote times or strange cultures either give or suggest to the modern artist forms which he can adapt to his needs, the elements of a new iconography.
Herbert Read