Shawn > Shawn's Quotes

“We men of this age are rotten with book-lore and with a yearning for the past.”
― James Elroy Flecker, The Last Generation A Story of the Future

“I dream in fire but work in clay.”
― Arthur Machen

“We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
― Henry James, The Middle Years

“In criticism, I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.”
― Andre Gide

“Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!”
― Thomas Mann

“It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed”
― Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa , The Leopard

“How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.”
― Benjamin Disraeli

“All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Having the critics praise you is like having the hangman say you’ve got a pretty neck”
― Eli Wallach

“The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.”
― Federico García-Lorca

“We have annexed the future into our present as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us”
― J.G. Ballard

“Kitsch is the inability to admit that shit exists”
― Milan Kundera

“Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living”
― John Cage

“All great art is a form of complaint”
― John Cage

“The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible”
― William S. Burroughs

“To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment or hotel room. … Am I alien? Alien from what exactly? Perhaps my home is my dream city, more real than my waking life precisely because it has no relation to waking life…”
― William S. Burroughs

“Being a critic is a terrific method for killing your love of art”
― David Toop

“Our technology forces us to live mythically”
― Marshall McLuhan

“A picture might be worth a thousand words but a good sentence is worth a thousand windows”
― Mati Klarwein

“Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect”
― George Sand, Indiana

“Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the niceties of language. Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and write”
― George Sand, Indiana

“The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Blue Cross: A Father Brown Mystery

“As a young man I was scornful about the supernatural but as I have got older, the sharp line that divided the credible from the incredible has tended to blur; I am aware that the whole world is slightly incredible”
― Colin Wilson

“Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions”
― Frantz Fanon

“Time is the enemy of identity”
― Michael Moorcock

“I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily.”
― La Rochefoucauld