Quote Category

I don’t know to what extent someone can BECOME an artist – you either are or you aren’t – and if you are you’ll HAVE to make your way to some kind of sickly light, no matter how terrible the soil you were seeded in your nature will out somehow.

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.

The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.

Winning the Pulitzer is not that big a deal. I have seen hundreds of plays that have won the prize and you couldn’t sit half way through it. The Pulitzer is a common prize that means very little.

To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

There is but one way left to save a classic; to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.