Art, Literature and Language

"The man who has no imagination has no wings."

Muhammad Ali

"Most of those who call themselves artists are in reality picture dealers, only they make the pictures themselves."

Samuel Butler

"There is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful."

John Constable, Lecture

"Read in order to live."

Gustave Flaubert, Letter, June 1857

"The creation continues incessantly through the media of man. But man does not create, he discovers."

Antoni Gaudi, Thanks Ben

"The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does."

Allen Ginsberg

"Wherever books will be burned, men also, in the end, are burned."

Heinrich Heine, Almansor

"Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round."

David Lodge, The British Museum is Falling Down

"As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself."

John Milton, Areopagitica

"But spectacles have a function, and they function only when you put them on, to look through them at the world. It is the same with language. That is to say, one shouldn't waste one's life in spectacle-cleaning or talking about language, or in trying to get a clear view of our language, or of 'our conceptual scheme'. The fundamental thing about human languages is that they can and should be used to describe something; and this something is, somehow, the world."

Karl Popper

"Works of art are of an infinite solitariness, and nothing is less likely to bring us near to them than criticism. Only love can apprehend and hold them, and can be just towards them."

Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe an einen jungen Dichter

"Mute icons are the only kind of beauty we find acceptable today."

Mark Rothko, Thanks Rosie / Manics

"Interpretation is the revenge of of the intellect upon art."

Susan Sontag

"A poem is never finished; it's always an accident that puts a stop to it - that is to say, gives it to the public."

Paul Valéry, Litterature

"Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read."

Frank Zappa