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

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Gilbert K. Chesterton, in 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

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

Groucho Marx, in Art and Literature

If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.

Anton Chekhov, (advice to a novice playwright), 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

Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art's temptations: that of being a genius.

Jorge Luis Borges, "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim", in Art and Literature

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

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

Frank Zappa, in Art and Literature

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.

Unknown, 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

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

Gilbert Highet, 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

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