Edward Gorey Quotes

There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.

Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is left after you have explained everything else.

Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away.

The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence.

In the finished article, the only thing that is important is whether it moves you or not. There is nothing else that is important at all.

I just feel that art is more important than ever, that art is something that can unify us, that can make America stronger.

It's true, of course, humor is very important in my life, as you know. That's the only reason for living, in fact.

The literary artist will ... portray what he knows, and little else. Imagination is built upon knowledge, and his dreams will rest upon his facts. He is worth to the world just about what he has learned from it, and no more.

Art without life is a poor affair.

Last, but not least -- in fact, this is most important -- you need a happy ending. However, if you can create tragic situations and jerk a few tears before the happy ending, it will work much better.

The film [Dream of Life] is not really an amateur work, despite the fact that none of us have ever done anything like this before; aesthetically, none of us are amateurs.

The point is, it didn’t really matter what the book was about. It was what it meant that was important.

Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist's artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all.

The fact that you have been knocked down is interesting, but the length of time you remained down is important.

The most important thing in art is taste.

I'm not criticizing Hollywood because I work there, I partly live there. But I'm saying this is the way it is, commerce is taking over art. Commerce has become the most important thing in the film industry. Hollywood is an industry, it's not an art form, therefore they have to address the bottom line. But in a way it's sad when you get a remake, isn't it?

...combining the concrete and the universal is at the center of what makes art important.

Something inside me clicked, like an engine shifting into higher gear. My thinking suddenly became faster and clearer. The anger and fear didn't go away, but I realized they weren't important. They weren't going to help me.

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.

My work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one.

I believe it's a fact of life that what we have is less important than what we make out of what we have.

It is not the number of facts he knows, but how much of a fact he is himself, that proves the man.

In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.

The history of science knows scores of instances where an investigator was in the possession of all the important facts for a new theory but simply failed to ask the right questions.