Chinua Achebe Quotes

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.

I suppose I have come to realize that entertainment is not easily dismissed. Beyond the meaning (of a work of art), it is important to people. Without it, lives can be dull.

Visionary art sure has played a vital role in my own "soul's journey," and I would say it's been important for many artists and viewers throughout history. Visionary art is one of the primary ways that human contact with higher subtle dimensions gets translated into our communally shared physical dimension.

Don’t try to be an artist. Find the thing within you that needs to be expressed. You might find it is art.

Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made - I try to act in the gap.

My interest in gospel music and liturgical art and Biblically-inspired literature has nothing to do with organised religion and everything to do with human beings trying to figure out their place on this planet.

I think life is the most important thing and you have to live that first and then you're art comes second.

I think that's what all art is for - for people to express what it is to be human. That's the purpose of it.

I use my platform for more than just myself. Art is a reflection of human emotions. To neglect the political is to neglect what essentially is your job of storytelling. I would rather be known for the content of my character than for the project that I did.

Sometimes I feel like art is supposed to mirror life, but strangely it's as if art is trying to catch up to life, to a certain extent?

Life is more important than art; that's what makes art important.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.

Beauty was so heavily important in my family, something I had to contend with. All those experiences allow me to make what I'm making today. I grew up with that. There's a reason why I express that in my art. I'm trying to figure it out myself.

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.

Art is the most frenzied orgy man is capable of.

Art—the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.

There are those who think that Zeffirelli's Hamlet is the way to treat Shakespeare. I think that cinema can handle much more. We somehow expect cinema to provide us with meaning, to console us. But that's not the purpose of art.

The magic question is, 'What for?' But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal.

So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious that it seems to me most of all the important qualities are put there unconsciously, and little of importance by the conscious intellect. But these are things for the psychologist to untangle.

Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?

I tend to keep my mind open to the different forms of art out there and I am always willing to try new stuff.

I can be an artist a posteriori, not a priori. If my pictures tell the story, our story, human story, then in a hundred years, then they can be considered an art reference, but now they are not made as art. I'm a journalist. My life's on the road, my studio is the planet.