Rebecca West - Art Quotes

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Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

Rebecca West
I cannot see that art is anything less than a way of making joys perpetual.

Rebecca West
The law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.

Rebecca West
A work of art may be simple, though that is not necessary. There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.

Rebecca West
My scepticism long ago led me to the belief that writers write for themselves and not for their readers and that art has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.

Rebecca West
Siegried Sassoon's book is a true work of art. It is an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity that excites the reader.

Rebecca West
Every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.

Rebecca West
Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

Rebecca West
Works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.

Rebecca West
The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.

Rebecca West
But art is so much more real than life. Some art is much more real than some life, I mean.

Rebecca West
Whatever a work of art may be, the artist certainly cannot dare to be simple. He must have a nature as complicated and as violent, as totally unsuggestive of the word innocence, as a modern war.

Rebecca West
A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.

Rebecca West
Bad art is maintained by the neurotic, who is deadly afraid of authentic art because it inspires him to go on living, and he is terrified of life.

Rebecca West
Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.

Rebecca West
Art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe.

Rebecca West
Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.

Rebecca West
What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience.

Rebecca West