Art and Literature

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

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

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Gilbert K. Chesterton, in Art and Literature

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

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

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.

Unknown, in Art and Literature

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

Frank Zappa, in Art and Literature

I live for books.

Thomas Jefferson, in Art and Literature and Wisdom and Ignorance

Dictionaries are like watches: the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

Samuel Johnson, in Art and Literature and Wisdom and Ignorance

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

Samuel Johnson, in Art and Literature and Work and Recreation

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.

Samuel Johnson, in Art and Literature

I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

Mark Twain, in Art and Literature

Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.

Voltaire, in Art and Literature and Wisdom and Ignorance

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

Paul Valéry, in Art and Literature

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.

Mark Twain, in Art and Literature

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

Igor Stravinsky, in Art and Literature

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody has read.

Mark Twain, in Art and Literature and Wisdom and Ignorance

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

Mark Twain, in Art and Literature

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.

Gilbert Highet, in Art and Literature

Love affairs have always greatly interested me, but I do not greatly care for them in books or moving pictures. In a love affair, I wish to be the hero, with no audience present.

E. W. Howe, in Art and Literature and Love and Hate