Medium Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

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.

I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.

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

Michael Schmidt

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.

We use eating as a medium for social relationships: satisfaction of the most individual of needs becomes a means of creating community.

Margaret Visser

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

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

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.

A generous friendship no cold medium knows, Burns with one love, with one resentment glows.

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

The essence of modernism lies in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. Modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of painting - the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment - came to be regarded as positive factors, and were acknowledged openly.

Clement Greenberg

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

I'm just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it's far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It's not just an art form; it's actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It's my way of telling a story.

Federico Fellini

Making drawings to indicate the many elements in any human situation is something which has characterized SSM from the start. Its rationale lies in the fact that the complexity of human affairs is always a complexity of multiple interacting relationships; and pictures are a better medium than linear prose for expressing relationships. Pictures can be taken in as a whole and help to encourage holistic rather than reductionist thinking about a situation.

Peter Checkland

In playing Beethoven the violinist should be a medium. There is little that is personal or that can be reduced to ingratiating sounds, pleasing slides and so on. Everything is dictated by the significance, the weight, structure and direction of the notes and passages themselves.

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.

We're no longer a once-a-day text medium for a predominantly domestic audience. Increasingly - around the clock - we use a combination of media in telling stories, and in commentary, to millions of users around the globe.

Alan Rusbridger

It's never about me. [My supporters] use me as a mark for themselves to recognize their own form of life: I become their medium. I am always very clear about that.

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.

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.