Art and Literature
44 aphorisms · 14 comments
Aphorisms in This Category
1–20 (44)
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/bkfg47jr · submitted 1997
I didn't like the play. But I saw it under unfavorable circumstances -- the curtains were up.
tiny.ag/6kpvlbo7 · submitted 1999
Picasso is a communist. Neither am I.
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.
tiny.ag/airwcz94 · 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/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/hcrgr6oa · submitted 1997
Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
tiny.ag/g8ncpo30 · submitted 1997
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody has read.
tiny.ag/9dyyuj3l · submitted 1997
An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
tiny.ag/nqpwl3vp · submitted 1997
Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.
tiny.ag/vgytosrx · submitted 1997
If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it better not come at all.
tiny.ag/zlwhlbfu · submitted 1997
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
tiny.ag/8dgit6e3 · submitted 1997
Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
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/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/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/asaliq9g · submitted 1997
I live for books.
Thomas Jefferson, in Art and Literature and Wisdom and Ignorance
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