Art and Literature
44 aphorisms · 14 comments
Aphorisms in This Category
1–20 (44)
tiny.ag/qdh9azfp · submitted 1997
It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.
tiny.ag/6kpvlbo7 · submitted 1999
Picasso is a communist. Neither am I.
tiny.ag/molfssqk · submitted 1997
Art is anything you can get away with.
tiny.ag/2drhezti · submitted 1997
If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.
Anton Chekhov, (advice to a novice playwright), in Art and Literature
tiny.ag/nsr67v4t · submitted 1997
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
tiny.ag/i0nu42ok · submitted 1997
The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.
tiny.ag/8dgit6e3 · submitted 1997
Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
tiny.ag/sybjkox1 · submitted 1997
Art is a deliberate recreation of a new and special reality that grows from your response to life. It cannot be copied; it must be created.
tiny.ag/dcgo3bsq · submitted 1999 by Erwin van Moll
Any time something is written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself.
Jorge Luis Borges, (autobiographical essay, 1970), in Art and Literature
tiny.ag/inomue9p · submitted 1999 by Erwin van Moll
There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.
Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote", in Art and Literature and Wisdom and Ignorance
tiny.ag/35xxiwwa · submitted 1997
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
tiny.ag/wqaxitgv · submitted 1999 by Erwin van Moll
Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art's temptations: that of being a genius.
Jorge Luis Borges, "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim", in Art and Literature
tiny.ag/g8ncpo30 · submitted 1997
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody has read.
tiny.ag/nqpwl3vp · submitted 1997
Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.
tiny.ag/zlwhlbfu · submitted 1997
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
tiny.ag/hcrgr6oa · submitted 1997
Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
tiny.ag/okkjfcye · submitted 1997
Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
tiny.ag/9dyyuj3l · submitted 1997
An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
tiny.ag/i7sepbck · submitted 1998
The writer, making every effort to appear innocent and noble, takes his revenge with the pen; while the murderer, less hypocrtical, takes it with the sword.
Christopher Spranger, The Effort to Fall, in Art and Literature
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