Art and Literature
44 aphorisms · 14 comments
Aphorisms in This Category
21–40 (44)
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/byzkqtr3 · 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 · 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/asaliq9g · submitted 1997
I live for books.
Thomas Jefferson, in Art and Literature and Wisdom and Ignorance
tiny.ag/qyerpit3 · 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/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.
tiny.ag/1zzynlyn · submitted 1997
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.
tiny.ag/yuezt1iy · submitted 1997
A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.
tiny.ag/bmdpgrs0 · submitted 1997
Let's have some new clichés.
tiny.ag/xudcfsey · submitted 1997
In a painting I want to say something comforting.
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/35xxiwwa · submitted 1997
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
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.
tiny.ag/c4btvpfg · submitted 1997
Some editors are failed writers, but then, so are most writers.
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/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.
21–40 (44)