This thread is to serve as an archive for quotes/excerpts that have been eye-opening, inspiring, or significant to you in your exploration of the arts.

THIS IS NOT A THREAD FOR DISCUSSION OR COMMENTS. Anything other than quotes will be deleted by the administrators. If you wish to respond to a quote or discuss it, please start a thread about it.

Hopefully this will grow into a useful resource of great thoughts.

"I think that a good film is one that has a lasting power, and you start to reconstruct it after you leave the theater. There are a lot of films that seem to be boring, but they are decent films. On the other hand, there are films that nail you to your seat and overwhelm you to the point that you forget everything, but you feel cheated later. These are the films that take you hostage. I absolutely don't like the films in which the filmmakers take their viewers hostage and provoke them. I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. I think those films are kind enough to offer you a nice nap and not leave you disturbed when you leave the theater. Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks. Those are the kind of films I like."
-Abbas Kiarostami:

I think writers with actual intentions generally end up saying things they already thought they knew, and I'm not much interested in reducing my vocation as a poet to something like propagandist. I write poems to find things out, not to communicate some previously ossified conclusion.

-poet Scott Cairns in an interview with Image

It is interesting to note how many artists have had physical problems to overcome, deformities, lameness, terrible loneliness.... It is chastening to realize that those who have no physical flaw, who move through life in step with their peers, who are bright and beautiful, seldom become artists. The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain.

-Madeleine L’Engle

"Let us sing now, not in order to enjoy a life of leisure, but in order to lighten your labors. You should sing as wayfarers do--sing, but continue your journey. Do not be lazy, but sing to make your journey more enjoyable. Sing, but keep going."

--St. Augustine

Novelists write out of their deepest selves. Whatever is there in them comes out willy-nilly, and it is not a conscious act on their part. If I were to consciously say, ‘This book shall now be a Christian book,’ then the act would become conscious and not out of myself. It would either be a very peculiar thing to do--like saying, ‘I shall now be humble’--or it would be simple propaganda...

Propaganda occurs when a writer is directly trying to persuade, and in that sense, propaganda is not bad. When I think of Who Am I? (1992), I think of propaganda. But persuasion is not story, and when you try to make a story out of persuasion then you’ve done something wrong to the story. You’ve violated the essence of what a story is."

I ask, "Would you then say that you are a Christian writer?" expecting her to quail at the label.

But she does not.... "A Christian first," she says. "I have a vocation as a writer; that is my calling. But a Christian first."

--from an interview with Katherine Paterson in Books and Culture

You make a movie for people to see. But to provoke them, to engage them in some way--that's the best thing I think you can do. The worst criticism in the world doesn't come from a movie critic. It's an audience member who uses you as two hours of air conditioning because you fit the time slot before the pool opens. And then never tells another person about what you've done. That is the most damning thing, that your sphere of influence lasts only until they get to their car door.

-film director Neil Labute

The lesson here is simply that courting approval, even that of peers, puts a dangerous amount of power in the hands of the audience. Worse yet, the audience is seldom in a position to grant (or withhold) approval on the one issue that really counts —namely, whether or not you’re making progress in your work. They’re in a good position to comment on how they’re moved (or challenged or entertained) by the finished product, but have little knowledge or interest in your process. Audience comes later. The only pure communication is between you and your work.

-from "Art and Fear" by David Bayles and Ted Orland

It’s a relational experience. Art happens somewhere along a relational arc, between what you are and the object of creation.

-Chaim Potok in an interview in Mars Hill Review

Art happens when what is seen is mixed with what is on the inside of the artist.

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev

Jeremiah 15:19 in NIV:

"Therefore this is what the LORD says:

'If you repent, I will restore you

that you may serve me;

if you utter worthy, not worthless, words,

you will be my spokesman.

Let this people turn to you,

but you must not turn to them.' "

...And when Jesus comes along saying that the greatest command of all is to love God and to love our neighbor, he too is asking us to pay attention. If we are to love God, we must first stop, look, and listen for him in what is happening around us and inside us. If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.

-Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

Here's an interesting clip from Salon Magazine 1999's interview with film director Terry Gilliam (The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, Brazil):

INTERVIEWER: At one point in your life, you studied to be a Presbyterian missionary. Where would you be today if you had taken that path? Any regrets?

GILLIAM: No regrets, but I may have gone to darkest Africa. The idea of being a missionary was a chance to see the world and have an excuse to do so. I basically got fed up with the church because they couldn't take a joke. I was a real little zealot, but was constantly making jokes about God. I used to say: "What kind of God is this that you believe in that can't take my little jokes?" The people in the church were appalled by this. So I walked away.

One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever comes to sit by it. Passersby see only a wisp of smoke rising from the chimney and continue on their way.

- Vincent Van Gogh

But it sometimes happens that it is not the poet himself, but another, who discovers the wider relevance [of the poet's work]. If so, he is justified in so interpreting it in the place where he finds it; for the relevance was always potentially there, and once seen and recognized it is actually there forever. This does not, of course, mean that we can read into poets anything that we jolly well like; any significance that contradicts the whole tenor of their work is obviously suspect. But it means that in a very real sense poets do sometimes write more greatly than they know; and it also means that every poet's work enriches not only those to whom he transmits the tradition, but also all those from whom he himself derived it.

- Dorothy Sayers, "Dante and Charles Williams", The Whimsical Christian

...if revelation is regarded simply as a system of truths about God and an explanation of how the universe came into existence, what will eventually happen to it, what is the purpose of Christian life, what are its moral norms, what will be the rewards of the virtuous, an so on, then Christianity is in effect reduced to a world view, at times a religious philosophy and little more, sustained by a more or less elaborate cult, by a moral discipline and a strict code of law. 'Experience' of the inner meaning of Christian revelation will necessarily be distorted and diminished in such a theological setting. What will such experience be? Not so much a living theological experience of the presence of God in the world and in mankind through the mystery of Christ, but rather a sense of security in one's own correctness: a feeling of confidence that one has been saved, a confidence which is based on the reflex awareness that one holds the correct view of the creation and purpose of the world and that one's behavior is of a kind to be rewarded in the next life. Or, perhaps, since few can attain this level of self-assurance, then the Christian experience becomes one of anxious hope--a struggle with occasional doubt of the "right answers", a painful and constant effort to meet the severe demands of morality and law, and a somewhat desperate recourse to the sacraments which are there to help the weak who must constantly fall and rise again. This of course is a sadly deficient account of true Christian experience, based on a distortion of the true import of Christian revelation.

-Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite

(This quote was included in an e-mail from recording artist Sam Phillips in answer to an inquiry about her own Christian perspective.)

Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy-the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.

-Norman Podhoretz

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.

- Erich Fromm

It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.


- E. L. Doctorow

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

- Robert Cecil Day-Lewis

A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.

-Frank Capra

Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.

- Brian Aldiss

The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.

- Edward Albee

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better. This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.

- Annie Dillard, from The Writing Life

I think one's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes. I see no reason for painting but that. If I have anything to offer, it is my emotional contact with the place where I live and the people I do.

-Andrew Wyeth, quoted in
Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life by Richard Meryman

Thanks to Margaret Smith for sending this one along:

There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen. Other pleasures fail us, or wound us while they charm; but the pen we take up rejoicing, and lay down with satisfaction; for it has the power to advantage not only its lord and master but many others as well, even though they be not born for thousands of years to come.... As there is none among earthly delights more noble than literature, so there is none more lasting, none gentler or more faithful; none that accompanies its possessor through the vicissitudes of life at so small a cost of effort or anxiety.

- Petrarch

Thanks to Geoff Pope for sending this one along:

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.

--Emily Dickinson

The truth must dazzle gradually.

- Emily Dickinson

If you express the best you have in you in your work, it is more than just the best you have in you that you are expressing.

-Frederick Buechner

If you lose yourself in your work, you find who you are.

--Frederick Buechner

Poetry may be defined as a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.

-Robert Frost

An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only.

-C.S. Lewis

Thanks to Fritz Liedtke for forwarding this and a few of the above excerpts:

The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story....

-C.S. Lewis

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening
that is translated through you into action,
and because there is only one of you in all time,
this expression is unique.

If you block it,

it will never exist through any other medium
and be lost.
The world will not have it.

It is not yours to determine how good it is;
nor how it compares with other expressions.
It is your business to keep the channel open.

You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work.
You have to keep open and aware directly
to the urges that motivate you.

Keep the channel open.

No artist is ever pleased.

There is no satisfaction whatever at any time.
There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction;
a blessed unrest that keeps us marching
and makes us more alive than the others."

--Martha Graham

A man in our society is not left alone. Not in the cities. Not in the woods. We must have commerce with our fellows, and that commerce is difficult and uneasy.

I do not understand how to live in this society. I don`t get it. Each person has an enormous effect. Call it environmental impact if you like. Where my foot falls, I leave a mark, whether I want to or not. We are linked together, each to each. You can`t breathe without taking a breath from somebody else. You can`t smile without changing the landscape. And so I ask the question: Why is theatre so ineffectual, unnew, not exciting, fussy, not connected to the thrilling recognition possible in dreams?

It`s a question of spirit. My ungainly spirit thrashes around inside me, making me feel lumpy and sick. My spirit is this moment dissatisfied with the outward life I inhabit. Why does my outward life not reflect the enormity of the miracle of existence? Why are my eyes blinded with always new scales, my ears stopped with thick chunks of fresh wax, why are my fingers calloused again? I don`t ask these questions lightly. I beat on the stone door of my tomb. I want out! Some days I wake up in a tomb, some days on a grassy mound by a river. Today I woke up in a tomb. Why does my spirit sometimes retreat into a deathly closet? Perhaps it is not my spirit leading the way at such times, but my body, longing to lie down in marble gloom and rot away.

Theatre is a safe place to do the unsafe things that need to be done. When it`s not a safe place, it`s abusive to actors and audiences alike. When its safety is used to protect cowards masquerading as heroes, it`s a boring travesty.

An actor who is truly heroic reveals the divine that passes through him, that aspect of himself that he does not own and cannot control. The control and artistry of the heroic actor is in service to his soul.
We live in an era of enormous cynicism. Do not be fooled.

Don`t act for money. You`ll start to feel dead and bitter. Don`t act for glory. You`ll start to feel dead, fat and fearful.

We live in an era of enormous cynicism. Do not be fooled.

You can`t avoid the pitfalls. There are lies you must tell. But experience the lie. See it as something dead and unconnected you clutch. And let it go.

Act from the depth of your feeling imagination. Act for celebration, for search, for grieving, for worship, to express that desolate sensation of wandering through the howling wilderness.

Don`t worry about art.

Do these things and it will be art.

--John Patrick Shanley

Art's necessary illusions serve to expose the illusory character of the experienced world.... Artists of neciessity refer to the given world, yet to be art their work must imply (refer to) a whole new world of unrealized possibility.

--James William McClendon, Witness: Systematic Theology

Where there is no exaggeration there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding.

--Oscar Wilde

...for all this: imagination. To tell our stories, to play them out, to paint pictures, moving and still, but above all to glimpse another way of being. Because as much as we need to describe the world we do live in, we need to dream up the kind of world we want to live in.

--Bono

"...Christians, freed from untowards assumptions about what art it and how it means, can actually see, feel, and hear more intensely; they can celebrate all the more riotously, simply because there is no confusion of messages, no false assumptions about causality, no worry about aberrant power and perverse behavioral leverage. They can maintain complete freedom from the artwork while being completely free to act with it. Faith rules over works, maker over handiwork, revelation over creation, and Creator over all. It is God who is both means and end, alpha and omega, author and finisher. Knowing this and living it out both rescues us and our art from error, misuse, and, above all, idolatry."

-Harold Best, Music Through the Eyes of Faith

"Holy shoddy is still shoddy."

Unknown (but attributed to Elton Trueblood)

When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business.

-Flannery O'Connor

The fact is that if the writer's attention is on producing a work of art, a work that is good in itself, he is going to take great pains to control every excess, everything that does not contribute to this central meaning and design. He cannot indulge in sentimentality, in propagandizing, or in pornography and create a work of art, for all these things are excesses. They call attention to themselves and distract from the work as a whole.

-Flannery O'Connor

Art is why I get up in the morning, but my definition ends there. It doesn't seem fair. I'm living for something I can't even define.

-Ani DiFranco

"Very many deny that the Sacred writers wrote according to the rules of art. Nor do we contend for the contrary; for they wrote not according to art, but according to grace, which is above all art; for they wrote that which the Spirit gave them to speak. And yet they who wrote on art made use of their writings to frame their art from, and to compose its comments and rules."
--Ambrose of Milan

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
-- John Updike

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
-- John Updike

I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.
-- Albert Einstein

Art, as far as it is able, follow nature, as a pupil imitates his master; thus your art must be, as it were, God's grandchild.
--Dante Alighieri

Art for art's sake
-- Dante Alighieri

And:

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.
--Frank Lloyd Wright

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
--Frank Zappa