Art and Literature
44 aphorisms · 14 comments
Aphorisms in This Category
1–20 (44)
tiny.ag/asaliq9g · ★★☆☆ Fair (3066 ratings) · submitted 1997
I live for books.
Thomas Jefferson, in Art and Literature and Wisdom and Ignorance
tiny.ag/qyerpit3 · ★★☆☆ Fair (374 ratings) · submitted 1997
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
Samuel Johnson, in Art and Literature and Work and Recreation
tiny.ag/qdh9azfp · ★★☆☆ Fair (881 ratings) · 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 · ★★☆☆ Fair (880 ratings) · submitted 1999
Picasso is a communist. Neither am I.
tiny.ag/molfssqk · ★★☆☆ Fair (820 ratings) · submitted 1997
Art is anything you can get away with.
tiny.ag/byzkqtr3 · ★★☆☆ Fair (651 ratings) · submitted 1997
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.
tiny.ag/xozwtgoz · ★★☆☆ Fair (866 ratings) · submitted 1997
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
tiny.ag/8dgit6e3 · ★★☆☆ Fair (1198 ratings) · submitted 1997
Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
tiny.ag/2drhezti · ★★☆☆ Fair (881 ratings) · 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 · ★★☆☆ Fair (944 ratings) · 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/is8fdtaa · ★★☆☆ Fair (1041 ratings) · 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.
tiny.ag/35xxiwwa · ★★☆☆ Fair (327 ratings) · submitted 1997
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
tiny.ag/airwcz94 · ★★☆☆ Fair (1078 ratings) · submitted 1997
A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.
G. C. Lichtenberg, in Art and Literature and Wisdom and Ignorance
tiny.ag/inomue9p · ★★☆☆ Fair (1073 ratings) · 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/wqaxitgv · ★★☆☆ Fair (1047 ratings) · 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/zlwhlbfu · ★★☆☆ Fair (474 ratings) · submitted 1997
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
tiny.ag/9dyyuj3l · ★★☆☆ Fair (392 ratings) · submitted 1997
An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
tiny.ag/okkjfcye · ★★☆☆ Fair (342 ratings) · 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/nqpwl3vp · ★★☆☆ Fair (462 ratings) · submitted 1997
Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.
tiny.ag/g8ncpo30 · ★★☆☆ Fair (517 ratings) · submitted 1997
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody has read.
1–20 (44)