A belief in Art
We humans create meaning for ourselves through storytelling. That is, we reflect on our experiences and then create narratives, images, shapes and sounds in order to share acquired wisdom with others. The resulting works of art can then become important elements of our culture.
Quotations
“Why People Sing”
Someone once asked me why people sing. I answered they sing for many of the same reasons birds sing. They sing for a mate, to claim their territory, or simply to give voice to the delight of being alive in the midst of a beautiful day. Perhaps more than birds do, humans hold a grudge. They sing to complain of how grievously they have been wronged, and how to avoid it in the future. They sing to help themselves execute a job of work. They sing so the subsequent generations won’t forget what the current generation endured, or dreamed, or delighted in.
Linda Ronstadt, from the interview “in a friend's East Village apartment, NYC”, 1968
“A Long Conversation”
At this point, I’m in the middle of a very long conversation with my audience.
It’s an ongoing dialogue about what living means. You create a space together. You are involved in an act of the imagination together, imagining the life you want to live, the kind of country you want to live in, the kind of place you want to leave to your children. What are the things that bring you ecstasy and bliss, what are the things that bring on the darkness, and what can we do together to combat those things? That’s the dialogue I have in my imagination when I’m writing. I have it in front of me when I’m performing.
Bruce Springsteen, from Rolling Stone 2007, 2009-Jan-05, © Rolling Stone LLC
“Art presents us with a window into the minds of these people”
Art presents us with a window into the minds of these people that other types of artifacts just can’t provide. It offers us glimpses into their world, their culture, and their belief systems.
Genevieve von Petzinger, from the interview “First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World's Oldest Symbols”, 15 Sep 2016, © CBC/Radio-Canada
“The divine literatus”
View’d, to-day, from a point of view sufficiently over-arching, the problem of humanity all over the civilized world is social and religious, and is to be finally met and treated by literature. The priest departs, the divine literatus comes. Never was anything more wanted than, to-day, and here in the States, the poet of the modern is wanted, or the great literatus of the modern.
Walt Whitman, from the essay “Democratic Vistas”, 1871
“Enemies of Art and Artist”
Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent, shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artist. They are suffering from the fact that art is not the primary moving force in their lives. They are suffering from the act, repeated daily, of keeping up the pretense that they can go their way, lead their lives, without art.
Henry Miller, from the book Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, 1957, © Henry Miller
“Human psychology will never be fully explained”
It’s all the reasons why human psychology will never be fully explained or pictured by scientific investigation — there are just too many variables, too many vectors pressing in on every incident. It’s the reason why storytelling and songwriting and poetry-making will always be so much more effective organizers and vehicles of our experience than studies in social science.
Adam Gopnik, from the book All That Happiness Is, 2024
“Questioning one's habitual ways of seeing”
To me, the only habit worth “designing for” is the habit of questioning one’s habitual ways of seeing, and that is what artists, writers, and musicians help us to do…. It’s in the realm of poetics that we learn how to encounter. Significantly, these encounters are not optimized to “empower us” by making us happier or more productive. In fact, they may actually completely unsettle the priorities of the productive self and even the boundaries between self and other. Rather than providing us with drop-down menus, they confront us with serious questions, the answering of which may change us irreversibly.
Jenny Odell, from the book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, 2019
“The language of religion and poetry”
We ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far.
Niels Bohr, from the book Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations, 1971
“The Songs are my Lexicon”
Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else. Songs like “Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain” or “I Saw the Light” – that’s my religion. I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.
Bob Dylan, from the interview “Bob Dylan 1997 Interview for Newsweek”, 10/5/1997
“Words that are empowered that make your hair stand on end”
Poetry is… words that are empowered that make your hair stand on end… that you recognize instantly as being some form of subjective truth that has an objective reality to it… because somebody’s realized it.
Allen Ginsberg, from the film No Direction Home, 2005
“Myths are stronger than anyone could have imagined”
Myths, it transpired, are stronger than anyone could have imagined. When the Agricultural Revolution opened opportunities for the creation of crowded cities and mighty empires, people invented stories about great gods, motherlands and joint stock companies to provide the needed social links. While human evolution was crawling at its usual snail’s pace, the human imagination was building astounding networks of mass cooperation, unlike any other ever seen on earth.
Yuval Noah Harari, from the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 2015, © Yuval Noah Harari
“Myth-Makers”
It’s only recently that I’ve come to understand that writers are not marginal to our society, that they, in fact, do all our thinking for us, that we are writing myths and our myths are believed, and that old myths are believed until someone writes a new one.
…
I think writers should be more responsible than they are, as we’ve imagined for a long time that it really doesn’t matter what we say. . . . I think it’s a beginning for authors to acknowledge that they are myth-makers and that if they are widely read, will have an influence that will last for many years – I don’t think that there’s a strong awareness of that now, and we have such a young culture that there is an opportunity to contribute wonderful new myths to it, which will be accepted.
Kurt Vonnegut, from the interview “WNYC Reader's Almanac”, 1974
“Our Reply to Violence”
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
“The Undisputed Sovereignty of the Human Being”
Jazz insists on the undisputed sovereignty of the human being. In this technological era we can easily be fooled into believing that sophisticated machines are more important than progressive humanity. That’s why art is an important barometer of identity. The arts let us know who we are in all of our glory, reveal the best of who we are. All the political and financial might in the world is diminished when put to the service of an impoverished cultural agenda. We see it in our schools, in our homes, and in our world profile: rich and fat, lazy and morally corrupt, with wild, out-of-control young people.
We all know that civilization requires a supreme effort. Our technology will become outmoded, but the technology of the human soul does not change.
Wynton Marsalis, from the book Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life, 2008, © Wynton Marsalis Enterprises
“The Power of Art”
When I started learning about jazz, I wasn’t into any kind of art. I had no idea it could have a practical purpose. Now, more than thirty years later, I testify to the power of art, and more specifically jazz, to improve your life–and keep on improving it.
Wynton Marsalis, from the book Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life, 2008, © Wynton Marsalis Enterprises
“Art and Spirit”
And whatever we mean by the word ‘spirit’ – let us just say, with Tillich, that it involves for each of us our ultimate concern – it is in that simple awestruck moment when great art enters you and changes you, that spirit shines in this world just a little more brightly than it did the moment before.
Ken Wilber, from the book The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad, 1997, © Ken Wilber
“Art has to transform life itself”
I really believe that art is capable of the total transformation of the world, and of life itself, and nothing less is really acceptable. So I mean if art is going to have any excuse for – beyond being a leisure-class plaything – it has to transform life itself.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1994
“Art is a Hammer”
Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.
“Art is a lie that makes us realize truth”
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. If he only shows in his work that he has searched, and re-searched, for the way to put over lies, he would never accomplish anything.
Pablo Picasso, from the article “The Arts”, 1923
“Art, Science and Empire”
The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.
“Cinema was about revelation”
For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.
Martin Scorsese, from the interview “The New York Times”, Nov 26, 2006, © The New York Times Company
“Couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art?”
What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?
“Deeper convictions of the heart”
Does he learn anything from writing them [his songs]? Does he work out ideas that way?
“I think you work out something. I wouldn’t call them ideas. I think ideas are what you want to get rid of. I don’t really like songs with ideas. They tend to become slogans. They tend to be on the right side of things: ecology or vegetarianism or antiwar. All these are wonderful ideas but I like to work on a song until those slogans, as wonderful as they are and as wholesome as the ideas they promote are, dissolve into deeper convictions of the heart. I never set out to write a didactic song. It’s just my experience. All I’ve got to put in a song is my own experience.”
Leonard Cohen, from the interview “Leonard Cohen: 'All I've got to put in a song is my own experience'”, 19 Jan 2012, © Leonard Cohen
“The dullness of fact”
The dullness of fact is the mother of fiction.
Isaac Asimov, from the book Fact and Fancy, 1962
“Excitement from Art”
The excitement we derive from a work of art is mostly the excitement of seeing connections that did not exist before, of seeing quite different aspects of life unified through a pattern.
Anthony Burgess, from the book English Literature: A Survey for Students, 1974
“The Inner Life of the Artist”
Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.
Edward Hopper, from the article “Statements by Four Artists”, 1953
“Life is not like formula fiction”
Life is not like formula fiction. The villain has a heart, and the hero has great flaws.
Anne Lamott, from the book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, 1994
“Little I recognized as music”
Thirty years after Brighton, I walked sadly away from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Fair. It was everything my twenty-one-year-old self might have dreamed of: 75,000 people packed into the Fairgrounds, with NPR-subscriber bags holding expertly marked programmes. America’s black musical heritage was on parade across two long weekends and eight stages. But the audience was almost entirely white. The performers had learned their lessons, dropping any modernizations or slick showbiz gestures and recreating the old-time styles the sophisticated audiences craved. On one level, it demonstrated respect for a deep culture and a rejection of shallow novelty. But removed from the soil in which it grew the music felt lifeless, like actors portraying characters who happened to be their younger selves. In two days wandering from stage to stage, I heard little I recognized as music.
Joe Boyd, from the book White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, 2006, © Joe Boyd
“The Loftiest and Purest Art”
Talk not so much, then, young artist, of the great old masters, who but painted and chisell’d. Study not only their productions. There is a still higher school for him who would kindle his fire with coal from the altar of the loftiest and purest art. It is the school of all grand actions and grand virtues, of heroism, of the death of patriots and martyrs – of all the mighty deeds written in the pages of history – deeds of daring, and enthusiasm, devotion, and fortitude.
“More Popular than Jesus”
Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I’ll be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.
John Lennon, from the interview “London Evening Standard”, 1966
“The Mysterious”
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man.
Albert Einstein, from the book The World As I See It, 1949
“Never Knew Cocaine to Improve Anything”
I listened in the studio control room as musicians’ modes of consciousness-alteration proceeded from grass, hash and acid to heroin and cocaine by the 1970s. All but the latter could, on occasion, provide benefits, at least to the music. I never knew cocaine to improve anything…. I suspect that the surge in cocaine’s popularity explains – at least in part – why so many great sixties artists made such bad records in the following decade.
Joe Boyd, from the book White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, 2006, © Joe Boyd
“Notation not to be confused with music itself”
Essentially then notation is a convention by which the general proportions of a composition may be roughly described. It is not to be confused with music itself. It is merely the blue-print from which music may be constructed. It has its advantages as an expedient for the preservation of the structural ideas of composers and as an aid in the manipulation of musical proportions; but music itself remains a transient experience of ephemeral designs in values of time, a process of change in which each element passes from the future into the past, dying at the instant of its birth, tangible only as a momentary oscillation of air particles.
If I seem to digress here into the general field of musical aesthetics, it is only because these discrepancies are so often ignored by writers on music as to constitute a continual source of muddlement.
Winthrop Sargeant, from the book Jazz: Hot and Hybrid, 1938
“The only sensible procedure for a critic”
The only sensible procedure for a critic is to keep silent about works which he believes to be bad, while at the same time vigorously campaigning for those which he believes to be good, especially if they are being neglected or underestimated by the public.
W. H. Auden, from the essay “The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays”, 1973
“The original naiveté”
You study, you learn, but you guard the original naiveté. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.
Henri Matisse, from the article “Time Magazine”, Feb 18, 2017
“Records we made together in the sixties”
These days most engineers confronted with a displeasing sound reach for the knobs on the console and tweak the high, mid or low frequencies. When that process is inflicted on more and more tracks of a multi-channel recording the sound passes through dozens of transistors, resulting in a narrower, more confined sound. With the added limitations of digital sound, you end up with a bright and shiny, thin and two-dimensional recording. To my ears anyway.
When John [Wood] heard a sound he didn’t like, he would lift his bulky frame off the chair and lumber down the stairs, muttering all the way. I began to be able to predict whether he was going to try a different microphone, reposition the existing one or shift the offending musician to another part of the studio. When I listen to records we made together in the sixties, I can still hear the air in the studio and the full dimension of the sounds the musicians created for us. I can hear the depth of Nick Drake’s breath as well as his voice, the grit in the crude strings of Robin Williamson’s gimbri and Dave Mattacks’ drum technique spread out warmly in aural Technicolor across the stereo spectrum.
Joe Boyd, from the book White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, 2006, © Joe Boyd
“Sacred values”
Sacred values differ from material or instrumental values in that they incorporate moral beliefs, such as the welfare of family, commitment to country, or identification with a particular religion that is thought to be absolute and inviolable. Sharing of these stories demonstrates honest reliable signals that an individual values the group and its goals. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the sharing of these sacred values is essential to the formation and maintenance of group identity.
David R. Samson, 2023
“Start with romance and build to a reality”
I think it’s part of the nature of man to start with romance and build to a reality. There’s hardly a scientist or an astronaut I’ve met who wasn’t beholden to some romantic before him who led him to doing something in life.
Ray Bradbury, from the book Mars and the Mind of Man, 12 Nov 1971
“The Tautness of this Resonant Connection”
No matter what the form, all art seems to produce a similar sensation – of timelessness, of implicit order, of connectedness. It is as if the work of art had sounded some deep note, and caused sympathetic vibration in a hidden string, a string whose one end is secured in the human heart, and from there ascends towards some unknowable summit, the existence of the termination point affirmed only by the tautness of this resonant connection.
Herb Bowie, from the book Reason to Rock: Rock Music as Art Form, 2010, © Herb Bowie
“That Magical Honeycomb of Words”
…language, that magical honeycomb of words into which human reality is forever dissolving and from which it continually reemerges, having invented itself anew. The adjective in the lotus. The jewel in the inkwell. A blue dolphin leaping from a sink of dirty dishes.
Tom Robbins, from the book Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life, 2014, © Tom Robbins
“Time is no match for Toni Morrison”
Time is no match for Toni Morrison. In her writing, she sometimes toyed with it, warping and creasing it, bending it to her masterful will. In her life’s story, too, she treated time nontraditionally. A child of the Great Migration who’d lifted up new, more diverse voices in American literature as an editor, Toni’s first novel wasn’t published until she was 39 years old. From there followed an ascendant career — a Pulitzer, a Nobel, and so much more — and with it, a fusion of the African American story within the American story. Toni Morrison was a national treasure. Her writing was not just beautiful but meaningful — a challenge to our conscience and a call to greater empathy. She was as good a storyteller, as captivating, in person as she was on the page. And so even as Michelle and I mourn her loss and send our warmest sympathies to her family and friends, we know that her stories — that our stories — will always be with us, and with those who come after, and on and on, for all time.
Barack Obama, from the book Time is no match for Toni Morrison, 06 Aug 2019
“Unbelievable Heroes”
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
John Rogers, from the blog post “Kung Fu Monkey”, 2009
“Vital and Significant Forms of Art”
Nor is it any part of my thesis to maintain that it [the detective story] is a vital and significant form of art. There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that. The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount; it has merely increased the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged.
Raymond Chandler, from the book The Simple Art of Murder, 1945, © Raymond Chandler
“We All Derive From the Same Source”
Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.
Henry Miller, from the book Henry Miller on Writing, 1964
“The world is failing precisely because”
To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.
Richard Powers, from the book The Overstory, 2018, © Richard Powers