Art is the triumph over chaos.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.

Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.

What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.

It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.

Art is the triumph over chaos.

That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.

The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.

There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.

Fiction is experimentation when it ceases to be that it ceases to be fiction.

A lonely man is a lonesome thing a stone a bone a stick a receptacle for Gilbeys gin a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.

For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

The principal rule of art is to please and to move. All the other rules were created to achieve this first one.

I grew up with art from the innocent age of ten - with art, but with no sense of identity.

One does not devote one's life in art to shock an audience.

The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.

My art became very public.

Riding a race bike is an art - a thing that you do because you feel something inside.

The idea is, if I can't heal from my art, then how can you heal?

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

One does not need buildings, money, power, or status to practice the Art of Peace. Heaven is right where you are standing, and that is the place to train.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

We have often been attracted to the story of the other, the outcast. And he and I just loved working together, so it just kept happening, and our relationship is completely bound up with our work. We enjoy each other's art.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

At the University of Maryland, my first year I started off planning to major in art because I was interested in theatre design, stage design or television design.

Art is an expression of who you are. Parts that I play are my sculptures.

There has always been quite a strong black and white art tradition in Australia, with quite a large contingent of cartoonists, given the size of the population.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.

What motivates me in art is the ugly and beautiful nature of the truth. It has to be truthful and honest, even if it is ugly and grotesque.

A great thing happening now in art is that artists are using the figure, the body, clothing, life.

I was the executive editor on a little magazine called Greek Accent, whose only claim to fame is that its art director went on to be the art director of Discover for many years.