I have nothing to say and I'm saying it and that is poetry

This morning I was looking around on the web for stuff on Cage & Duchamp (above), and came across a page of helpful quotes. I found many of them to be quite nice, and on art, so I’m reproducing those here.


The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.
--Lucian Freud


Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
--James Russell Lowell


You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
--Mark Twain


The best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time.
--Abraham Lincoln


I'm afraid that if my devils leave me, my angels will take flight as well.
--Rainer Maria Rilke


What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us.
--Oliver Wendell Holmes


There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.
--Henri Matisse


Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible.
--T. E. Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia


...the neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.
--Alfred Adler


I have nothing to say And I'm saying it And that is poetry
--John Cage


Someone once asked me where I lived and I said, 'On the periphery'
--Oscar Levant


Talent's like a baby. Wrap it up in wool and it goes to sleep.
--Oscar Levant


I don't develop; I am.
--Pablo Picasso


There comes a moment... When imagination gives out and Reality leaps forth. It is frightful!
--Edgar, in Strindberg, Dance of Death.


Better to pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
--James Joyce


Life is given to painful awareness. Now is the task to endure.
--Rod Milgate, from Pictures At An Exhibition.


I do feel like a fraud a lot of the time because I've never been interested in people who say 'I'm a writer', 'I'm an artist'. Too much is made of the role and not enough of the work. We are such a celebrity-driven age and a status-driven age, that the status becomes more important than the actual work.
--Richard Flanagan, 1996


I would rather have torment than annihilation. If I was in hell, I would always feel I had a chance of escaping.
--Francis Bacon


It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.
--Oscar Wilde


There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
--Pablo Picasso


A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.
--Abraham Maslow


Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
--Howard Aiken