Aphorisms Galore!

Art and Literature

44 aphorisms  ·  14 comments

Aphorisms in This Category

tiny.ag/is8fdtaa  ·  submitted 1999

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

tiny.ag/1zzynlyn  ·  submitted 1997

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

Gilbert Highet, in Art and Literature

tiny.ag/4dr826gh  ·  submitted 1997

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

Gustave Flaubert, in Art and Literature

tiny.ag/c4btvpfg  ·  submitted 1997

Some editors are failed writers, but then, so are most writers.

T. S. Eliot, in Art and Literature

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.

Unknown, in Art and Literature

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/molfssqk  ·  submitted 1997

Art is anything you can get away with.

Terence Trent D'Arby, in Art and Literature

tiny.ag/6kpvlbo7  ·  submitted 1999

Picasso is a communist. Neither am I.

Salvador Dalí, in Art and Literature

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.

Salvador Dalí, in Art and Literature

tiny.ag/8dgit6e3  ·  submitted 1997

Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

Joseph Conrad, in Art and Literature

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.

Mark Twain, in Art and Literature

tiny.ag/zlwhlbfu  ·  submitted 1997

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

Mark Twain, in Art and Literature

tiny.ag/9dyyuj3l  ·  submitted 1997

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

Paul Valéry, in Art and Literature

tiny.ag/nqpwl3vp  ·  submitted 1997

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

Mark Twain, in Art and Literature

tiny.ag/g8ncpo30  ·  submitted 1997

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

Mark Twain, in Art and Literature and Wisdom and Ignorance

tiny.ag/35xxiwwa  ·  submitted 1997

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

Frank Zappa, in Art and Literature

tiny.ag/hcrgr6oa  ·  submitted 1997

Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.

Voltaire, in Art and Literature and Wisdom and Ignorance

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

tiny.ag/hp6j7tok  ·  submitted 1997

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

Igor Stravinsky, in Art and Literature