The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.
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Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
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Literature is news that stays news.
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If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.
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'Tis not need we know our every thought or see the work shop where each mask is wrought wherefrom we view the world of box and pit, careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit and serve our jape's turn for a night or two.
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I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.
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There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, ''It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.''
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The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
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The real meditation is... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voil? une chose!! You try it. You try finding out why you're you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voil? une chose!
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The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.
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A heroic figure... not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on him.
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Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
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All great art is born of the metropolis.
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In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
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A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
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A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
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If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practised, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.
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May God damn for ever all who cry \'Peace!'
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Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
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When our two dusts with Waller's shall be laid, Siftings on siftings in oblivion,...
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Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
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Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
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I ask a wreathwhich will not crush my head. And there is no hurry about it;...
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But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.
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AS A MIND, who the hell else is there left for me to take an interest IN??
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Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry,
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Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.
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The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
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Poetry withers and dries out when it leaves music, or at least imagined music, too far behind it. Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.
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A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
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