We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.
My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.
It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.
I think that the power of art is the power to wake us up, strike our depths, change us. What are we searching for when we read a novel, see a film, listen to a piece of music? We are searching, through a work of art, for something that alters us, that we weren’t aware of before.
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
That is one of the functions of art: to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
Some say art is our highest form of hope… Perhaps it’s our only hope.
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see.
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.