Medium Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Paintings are complex puzzles in the twilight world between abstraction and figuration. I use the medium in a simple, unsophisticated way to express what I don't see expressed anywhere else.

Stefan Szczesny

What I love about fiction is the way this form of expression allows an author to wrestle an idea to the ground, as opposed to the bumper-sticker dialectics that pass for political and philosophical discourse in most sectors of our culture. In the age of mass communication, we need the quiet, contemplative and often ambiguous medium of the novel more than ever.

James K. Morrow

I despise the comic industry, but I will always love the comic medium.

The impulse of nature, fused through the personality of the artist by laws arising from the particular nature of the medium, produces the rhythm and the personal expression of a work. Then the life of the composition becomes a spiritual unity.

It was from him I learned that the stage is too coarse a medium for the works of the supreme poet; Shakespeare's depths can only be plumbed in the solitude of the study. So I used to shut myself up and plumb away for hours, and I acquired such aptitude that for a time there was a belief that I might pipe Shakespeare into young minds of the rest of my days, as a full-fledged academic plumber.

Robertson Davies

Punning is a rewording experience. The inveterate (not invertebrate) punster believes that a good pun is like a good steak — a rare medium well done.

Richard Lederer

The first living organisms on Earth doubtless arose in an aqueous environment, and the course of evolution has been shaped by the proper ties of the aqueous medium in which life began.

Albert L. Lehninger

Let me formulate the artistic disposition as follows: it is reacting with one's ideal to the flaw in oneself and in the world, and somehow making that reaction formation solid enough in the medium so that it indeed becomes an improved bit of real world for others.

An idea can only be materialized with the help of a medium of expression, the inherent qualities of which must be surely sensed and understood in order to become the carrier of an idea.

Despite my fervour for many Surrealist painters, I was soon wary of the preeminence of those 'literary anecdotes' that made many works appear as 'genre clichés', not unlike nineteenth-century pastiches. They often ignored the visual possibilities of the painting medium.

And then as always, I saw the prayer coming at me. And, as always, Number 1 killed me! Set me on fire, cooked me to medium rare and then ate me! I really, really, really hope I haven't just given away the ending of this story.

James Patterson

Intimacy is not a happy medium. It is a way of being in which the tension between distance and closeness is dissolved and a new horizon appears. Intimacy is beyond fear.

The stability of the internal medium is a primary condition for the freedom and independence of certain living bodies in relation to the environment surrounding them.

Material that might be illegal is such a minuscule part of what is available that we have to remember — and I mean not only librarians but everybody has to remember not to let it overshadow the incredible wealth of information that is available in this medium.

I think intelligence has a kind of range of sense and allows us to contemplate the coexistence of the conceptual aspect of thought and the emotional aspect of thought as ideally wedded, troth-plight, and the circumstances in which this troth-plight can be effected are to be found in the medium of language itself.

Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.

The medium is as unimportant as I myself. Essential is only the forming... I take any material whatsoever if the picture demands it. When I adjust materials of different kinds to one another, I have taken a step in advance of mere oil painting, for in addition to playing off color against color, line against line, form against form etc., I play off material against material, wood against sack clothes.

Kurt Schwitters

It's a highly effective way of spreading ideas, information and content. Don't be distracted by the 140-character limit. A lot of the best tweets are links. It's instantaneous. Its reach can be immensely far and wide. Why does this matter? Because we do distribution too. We're now competing with a medium that can do many things incomparably faster than we can. It's back to the battle between scribes and movable type. That matters in journalistic terms. And, if you're trying to charge for content, it matters in business terms. The life expectancy of much exclusive information can now be measured in minutes, if not in seconds.

Alan Rusbridger

I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.

Life is amazing: and the teacher had better prepare himself to be a medium for that amazement.

Reality's kind of a medium, maybe greater than paper. We all want life to have the same texture that we read about in novels.

Jonathan Gillette

Examples of exaggeration can be found in almost any advertising medium. The use of the superlative is altogether too prevalent. 'The finest,' 'the best,' 'the greatest,' 'the purest,' 'the most economical,' and so on ad infinitum, are hurled at the public everywhere. Surely not all products of the sme class can be the best or the finest.

Prose uses the medium of language whilst poetry serves language and explores it.

Michael Schmidt

I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism—real life—the now.

Berenice Abbott

Not everyone is concerned with the deep future, Manfred interrupts. It's important! If we live or die, that doesn't matter—that's not the big picture. The big question is whether information originating in our light cone is preserved, or whether we're stuck in a lossy medium where our very existence counts for nothing. It's downright embarrassing to be a member of a species with such a profound lack of curiosity about its own future, especially when it affects us all personally! I mean, if there's going to come a time when there's nobody or nothing to remember us then what does –
Manfred?
He stops in midsentence, his mouth open, staring dumbly.