William H. Gass Quotes

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

One of the things I love about theater, one of the reasons I'll never give it up, is that it's fifty percent the audience's responsibility.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

I think of art as the highest level of creativity. To me, it is one of the greatest sources of enjoyment.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

Musicals are plays, but the last collaborator is your audience, so you've got to wait 'til the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration.

I guess it's hard work... whatever the decision is, how to show it to people that aren't necessarily dancers, how to get people to think about more than themselves.

If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.

Art is everywhere, and everywhere is art.

The gift art gives us is that instead of seeing only our own world, we see into other times, which offers a window into other cultures and sensibilities.

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

The social dimension of the art world is fascinating to me, but I also want to entertain the reader, so I will let a character say something funny.

Film has become a very passive experience, but with theatre, there is a contract made with the audience, where they participate. That's why my parents' puppet theatre was such a special place - people used their imaginations. It's a muscle that needs using.

I'm inspired by art - in whatever form it takes. I love when I see a painting or a photograph that captures my attention.

What higher art does is to invite us in and allow us to make decisions.

Theater can be elusive and poetic, but it doesn't thrive when it doesn't reach an audience.

As a creative, as an artist, I'm just excited when people want my stuff, and want to experience it.

In the study of the fine arts, they mutually assist each other.

The object of art like every other product creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.

A woman is fascinated not by art but by the noise made by those in the field.

Works of art are meant to be lived with and loved, and if we try to understand them, we should try to understand them as we try to understand anyone — in order to know them better, not in order to know something else.

Art is for stimulation, excitement, adventure.

Do people choose the art that inspires them — do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller.