“There is
one art,
no more,
no less:
to do
all things
with art-
lessness.”
Piet Hein (1905–1996) Danish puzzle designer, mathematician, author, poet
Ars Brevis
Grooks
"The Precarious Vogue of Ingmar Bergman" in Esquire (April 1960); republished as "The Northern Protestant" in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961) and in The Price of the Ticket (1985)
“There is
one art,
no more,
no less:
to do
all things
with art-
lessness.”
Piet Hein (1905–1996) Danish puzzle designer, mathematician, author, poet
Ars Brevis
Grooks
Richard Wilbur (1921–2017) American poet
As quoted by John Gery in Ways of Nothingness: Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry (1996)
Context: In each art the difficulty of the form is a substitution for the difficulty of direct apprehension and expression of the object. The first difficulty may be more or less overcome, but the second is insuperable; thus every poem begins, or ought to, by a disorderly retreat to defensible positions. Or, rather, by a perception of the hopelessness of direct combat, and a resort to the warfare of spells, effigies, and prophecies. The relation between the artist and reality is an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can approach that reality only by indirect means.
“Art has to be a kind of confession.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States
"An interview with James Baldwin" (1961); an interview with Studs Terkel published in Conversations With James Baldwin (1989)
Context: Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too — the terms with which they are connected to other people.
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“To survive, you must tell stories.”
Umberto Eco book The Island of the Day Before
The Island of the Day Before
Example (musician) (1982) English rapper and singer
"Whisky Story" (song, 2015) <br class="br"> ("Whisky Story" on YouTube (Official video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQceqbA7kFI <br class="br">Non-album singles, As lead artist