William Gaddis Quotes

I don't how I can describe the quality that is only found in art (be it music, literature, painting, or whatever), this quality, it's just there, and it endures.

The fine arts, both in those who cultivate and those only who admire them, open and expand the mind to great ideas. They inspire liberal feelings, create a harmony of temper, favorable to a sense of justice and a habit of moderation in our social intercourse.

A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.

[In art] you are telling the reader or the listener or the viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition.

Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.

The highest praise we can attribute to any writer, painter, sculptor, builder, is, that he actually possessed the thought or feeling with which he has inspired us.

I don't think biology is replacing the feeling experienced through art. Biology is capable of giving additional insights. It's a parallel, not a substitutive process.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

It's not about facts, it's about feelings. It's about remembering feelings and happiness. A definition of art is that it makes concrete our most subtle emotions. I think the highest form of art is music. It's the most abstract of all art expression.

You can have an art experience in front of a Rembrandt... or in front of a piece of graphic design.

A work of art doesn't have to be explained.

A white lace curtain on the window was for me as important as a great work of art. This gossamer quality, the reflection, the form, the movement. I learned more about art from that than I did in school.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why don't we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? ...people who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

It's hard to explain your emotions when you see a work of art.

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.

There's something in music that fascinates me - how it communicates emotion so immediately. That's something I wanted in my paintings.

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?

My whole career I've been interested by the distinction between an emotional and an intellectual response to an artwork.

Not every work of art connects with the audience.

The beauty of art is that it allows you to slow down, and for a moment, things that once seemed unfamiliar become precious to you.