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The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that...more

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Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled......more

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For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, ...more

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as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is.

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A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

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At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.

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It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

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Vladimir Nabokov“... one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I...more

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Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I sh...more

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We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally a...more

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I discovered in nature the non utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and dec...more

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Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one's reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus le...more