Art and Literature

No sane man will dance.

Cicero, in Art and Literature

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

Tom Clancy, in Art and Literature

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

Joseph Conrad, 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

Art is anything you can get away with.

Terence Trent D'Arby, in Art and Literature

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

Frank Zappa, 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

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

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

John Keats, 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

Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.

Voltaire, in Art and Literature and Wisdom and Ignorance

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.

Mark Twain, in Art and Literature

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

Paul Valéry, in Art and Literature

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

Samuel Johnson, in Art and Literature and Work and Recreation

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.

Samuel Johnson, in Art and Literature

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

I live for books.

Thomas Jefferson, in Art and Literature and Wisdom and Ignorance

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.

E. W. Howe, in Art and Literature and Love and Hate

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.

Gilbert Highet, in Art and Literature