The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so read more

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

I don't want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.

I don't want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to read more

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential read more

The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art.

Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a read more

Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.

Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.

Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make read more

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.