Ben Lerner Quotes

I find that it's a very odd thing to think of competition when you're talking about what I still think of as art. I don't think of competing with actors or filmmakers at all. You do compete, in a way, at the box office, but we're far enough apart when both films are coming out that I'm not concerned with that either.

I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.

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'.

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.

I think whatever you believe in affects whatever you express, whatever you create. It shapes your morality in some way. But I don't think that's something that you have to shove down people's throats. I'd rather keep it in the background, and I'd rather people came to the music in an unprejudiced way. I'm glad, in a sense, that most people don't know about me, what I do, much. I'd rather they hear the music, and then say, "I wonder what kind of person created this."

Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we're writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.

So is fighting incompleteness the source of artistic neurosis? I doubt it. At most, this would apply to artists who deal with particular kinds of problems. I don't think we should think of Haydn or Mozart or Dickens or George Eliot in these terms.

Art, of course, is a way of thinking, a way of mining reality.

I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.

In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me.

We started to confuse entertainment with art, because art has a component of entertainment. It has to have that or it becomes too boring. It becomes too lost in its own devices. But I just think that we started to lose, and even before that, it's not necessary.

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

Personally, I never believe an artist saying "I do it for myself" is saying the truth, because why would you go through the trouble of making something that goes out into the world if you didn't care about somebody else seeing it? It's like the difference between those who choose "more comfortably termed entertainment" versus what people think of as the "art life," which is supposedly more monastic or spiritual. I don't believe in those distinctions.

Art is a little bit larger than life - it's an exhalation of life and I think you probably need a little touch of madness.

Solve problems, make art, think deeply.

I should think that many of our poets, the honest ones, will confess to having no manifesto. It is a painful confession but the art of poetry carries its own powers without having to break them down into critical listings. I do not mean that poetry should be raffish and irresponsible clown tossing off words into the void. But the very feeling of a good poem carries its own reason for being... Art is its own excuse, and it’s either Art or it’s something else. It’s either a poem or a piece of cheese.

I think that one of the things is that, if you are going to decide to be a painter, you have got to decide that you are not going to be afraid of making a fool of yourself. I think another thing is to be able to find subjects which really absorb you to try and do. I feel that without a subject you automatically go back into decoration because you haven't got the subject which is always eating into you to bring it back - and the greatest art always returns you to the vulnerability of the human situation.

When I paint, I never think of selling. People simply fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights.

I look upon literature as an art, and I believe that if you misuse it or abuse it, it will leave you. It is not a thing that you can nail down and use as you want. You have to let it use you, too.

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.

Sometimes I find myself at three o'clock in the morning painting something and throwing things around and seeing what works. I'd like to properly study fine art. I think it would be quite an interesting endeavor.

The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art. Eliot said that art is the escape from personality, which I think is right. We know that Velázquez embezzled money from the Spanish court and wanted power and so on, but you can't see this in his art.

It present to allow me to ask myself questions about what I'm doing. I think that's what visual art does - it either reminds you of something or allows you to question something. I don't know why Robert Motherwell; I love so many different artists.

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.