Flannery O'Connor Quotes

I think that limitations are the most important part of any art form

Art chooses its constraints.

Art is not chaste. Those ill prepared should be allowed no contact with art. Art is dangerous. If it is chaste, it is not art.

Great art likes chains. The greatest artists have created art within bounds. Or else they have created their own chains.

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

We feel more and more intensely about the music we make. It's unexpected, and not always what you would think of in Beach House. It's all art in the end. We aren't making records because we have to; it's because it's what we want to express.

Art is a game. Too bad for him who makes a duty of it.

Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth.

Their 'magic' is Art, delivered from many of its human limitations.

Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.

Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.

Making art is nothing but risk, always. If it's not risk, it's no good.

We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth.

Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.

What is great about art and artists is that we get to ask the questions, even though we may never know the answers.

The world of the arts is by no means always comfortable, but neither is it likely ever to be boring. It is full of surprises, humor, traps for the unwary, and challenges to smugness. It is a world of moods as well as of revelation, of beliefs and fears, of unpleasant truth as well as of delicious fantasy. Perhaps it is arrogant to say that anyone who does not venture into this world is only half-interested in life. I say it, nonetheless.

Art has always been and is in its very essence the boldest departure from nature. It is the bridge into the spirit world.

There is nothing that art cannot express.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

If life were organized, there would be no need for art.

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

To me art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk.

I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.

You can’t teach art, so ART SCHOOL is a contradiction in terms.