I think America likes its artists to die young, in atonement for materialist America’s sins.
— anthony burgess
Posted January 19, 2012 at 10:06pm in anthony burgess better-said artists america materialism sin death
It is a perversity to be jealous of the past because the past is usually made of ashes. But with the artist the past survives in another form, and I can understand those who are jealous of the past of an artist. It becomes a monument. Examine the past of most people, and you find a neat cemetery or an urn with ashes. But examine the past of an artist and you find monuments to its perpetuity, a book, a statue, a painting, a symphony, a poem.
— anais nin (the diary of anais nin)
You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marks to be understood as ‘beauty.’ Think about [the] Dutch painting, where sunlight is falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning — that beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary. Or a painting like Rembrandt’s ‘Carcass of Beef,’ where a simple piece of meat caught his eye because there was something mysterious about it. You also get that in Edward Hopper: Look at the sunlight! or Look at the human being! These are instances of genius. Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that. And it’s not Versailles. It’s a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.
— marilynne robinson (interview in the paris review)
(Source: crashinglybeautiful, via awritersruminations)
Posted December 1, 2010 at 11:45pm in marilynne robinson the paris review better-said detachment beauty perspective art artists culture genius
I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts. This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever.
— kurt vonnegut
(via loveyourchaos)
There is no escape. You can’t be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing.
Don’t try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is - particularly the artist - particularly myself!
— hermann hesse
You couldn’t possibly be an artist, in the first place, because you lack faith. You couldn’t possibly have beautiful ideas because you kill them off in advance. You deny what it takes to make beauty, which is love, love of life itself, love of life for its own sake. You see the flaw, the worm in everything. An artist, even when he detects a flaw, makes it into something flawless.
— henry miller (sexus)
Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.
— w somerset maugham (the moon and sixpence)
