I have ridiculously bad eyesight, but I have learned to live with an impressionistic view. Life is a Monet painting. I wander around enjoying myopia.
The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity of the dissimilar.
Capitalism is an art form.
The beauty of a lovely woman is like music.
I see myself as the literary equivalent of a skilled lathe-operator, or a basket-weaver; a potter, maybe: I make mildly diverting objects that people want to buy.
The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.
The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour perfectly hamonized; it is true to life.
When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.
As sounds in a musical composition can be used not to express physical objects but ideas, emotions, harmonies, rhythmic orders and most any expression of the human mind and spirit, so light can be used visually to express the mind and spirit.
I'd rather lose large than win slightly. I think life is an oil painting, not a watercolor.
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
I think of painting without subject matter as music without words.
Frank Gehry for instance likes to imagine his buildings as sculptures. I like to imagine my sculptures as architectural.
A high-brow is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso.
To ask a novelist to talk about his novels is like asking somebody to cook about their dancing.
There is no old Adam Young, there is no new Adam Young, merely different colors and different brushstrokes over the same canvas.
If you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting.
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Poetry is to a painting what life is to man.
Just as art brings you to another place, so does religion - and to ask questions of factuality tends to reduce both. If you say you were inspired by a novel, that implies that your book is a work of fiction.
Music is like creating an emotional painting. The sounds are the colors.
For me, musicians are poets. Beethoven describes himself as a poet of tones, just like Coltrane's a poet of tempo.
Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.
Picasso had his pink period and his blue period. I am in my blonde period right now.
I started out as an artist, and what I do is verbal paintings. I paint a picture. Hopefully, you'll see the characters and what they're doing and what they're saying.
