beginning and end

The beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, recreated, moulded, and reconstructed in a personal form and original manner.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 to 1832)

[A favorite quote of the Edward Hopper who said it applied equally to painting.]

by indirect means

The relationship between an artist and reality is always an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can only approach that reality by indirect means.

—Richard Wilbur, Quarterly Review of Literature, 7, p.189

entity of direct appeal

Let me interpose here this axiom of criticism: by explaining the nature of a work of art, we do not explain it away. It is an entity of direct appeal; we do not, in the process of appreciation…unfold the process of creation.

—Herbert Read, Form in Modern Poetry (Sheed & Ward, 1933)

living use

Art is not living. It is a use of living. The artist has the ability to take that living and use it in a certain way, and produce art.

—Audre Lorde, “My Words Will Be There,” I am your sister: collected and unpublished writings of Audre Lorde (Oxford Univ. Press, 2009)

no art, only artists

There is no such thing as art...There are only artists who are favoured with a gift of balancing shapes and colours until they get it right. And, rarer still, who possess the integrity of character which never rests content with half solutions, but is ready to forgo all easy effects, all superficial success for the toil and agony of sincere work.

—E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (1950)

symbolic

Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.

—Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form, (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953, p. 40).

art is...

Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention.

—Guy Davenport