Art and Literature

I choose a block of marble and chop off everything I don't need.

François-Auguste Rodin, (on how he created his statues), in Art and Literature

I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.

Elvis Presley, in Art and Literature

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist after one grows up.

Pablo Picasso, in Art and Literature

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

Flannery O'Connor, in Art and Literature

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Flannery O'Connor, in Art and Literature

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

P. J. O'Rourke, in Art and Literature

Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail.

Luciano Pavarotti, in Art and Literature and Wisdom and Ignorance

Art is the lie that makes us realize the truth.

Pablo Picasso, in Art and Literature

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.

Gustave Flaubert, in Art and Literature

Some editors are failed writers, but then, so are most writers.

T. S. Eliot, in Art and Literature

I didn't like the play. But I saw it under unfavorable circumstances -- the curtains were up.

Groucho Marx, in Art and Literature

Art is anything you can get away with.

Terence Trent D'Arby, in Art and Literature

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.

Salvador Dalí, in Art and Literature

Picasso is a communist. Neither am I.

Salvador Dalí, in Art and Literature

Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

Joseph Conrad, in Art and Literature

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

If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it better not come at all.

John Keats, in Art and Literature

The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.

Tom Clancy, in Art and Literature

No sane man will dance.

Cicero, in Art and Literature

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