“How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material.”
"Katherine Anne Porter" (p. 300)
American Fictions (1999)
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Elizabeth Hardwick 14
Novelist, short story writer, literary critic 1916–2007Related quotes

"Foreword to an Exhibit: I" (1944)
Context: Art is a mystery.
A mystery is something immeasurable.
In so far as every child and woman and man may be immeasurable, art is the mystery of every man and woman and child. In so far as a human being is an artist, skies and mountains and oceans and thunderbolts and butterflies are immeasurable; and art is every mystery of nature. Nothing measurable can be alive; nothing which is not alive can be art; nothing which cannot be art is true: and everything untrue doesn’t matter a very good God damn...

VIII. Art and Artists
1910 - 1915, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911

Götz Adriani, Joseph Beuys, Winfried Konnertz (1979) Joseph Beuys, life and works. p. 255
1970's

On organic farming, in Belasco, Warren James, 2007, "The Organic Paradigm" http://books.google.com/books?id=4-8Tcsb2PHwC&lpg=PP1&pg=PT63#v=onepage&q&f=false, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry, Cornell University Press, ISBN 0801473292, p. 69.