Joyce Carol Oates interviews herself (2013)
Context: I think that art is the commemoration of life in its variety. The novel, for instance, is “historic” in its embodiment in a specific place and time and its suggestion that there is meaning to our actions. Without the stillness, thoughtfulness and depths of art, and without the ceaseless moral rigors of art, we would have no shared culture — no collective memory. As it is, in contemporary societies, where so much concentration is focused on social media, insatiable in its myriad, fleeting interests, the “stillness and thoughtfulness” of a more permanent art feels threatened.
“Variety's the very spice of life,
That gives it all its flavour.”
Source: The Task (1785), Book II, The Timepiece, Line 606.
“The greater the variety of intelligent life Don saw, the more he became sensitive to its presence.”
Source: The Wanderer (1964), Chapter 33 (p. 259).
“I don't think about art when I'm working. I try to think about life.”
On his artistic process in “Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist” https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-artist-jean-michel-basquiat in Artsy (2019 Jun 6)
N 45, as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 35
after 1930
“I don't know if there is a one for me. I think I might like variety.”
Source: The Boyfriend List: 15 Guys, 11 Shrink Appointments, 4 Ceramic Frogs and Me, Ruby Oliver
“I think my stance and my way of life is my most important art.”
Osnos, Evan. “ It’s Not Beautiful: An Artist Takes On the System http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/24/100524fa_fact_osnos?currentPage=all.” New Yorker, May 24, 2010, 54–63.
2010-, 2010
Bill Moyers interview (2002)
Context: I understood really the power of art to transform. I think transformation became the main word in my life.
Transformation because you don't want to just put a mirror in front of people and say, here, look at yourself. What do you see? You want to have a skewed mirror. You want a mirror that says you didn't know you could see the back of your head. You didn't know that you could amount cubistic see almost all the same aspects at the same time. It allows human beings to step out of their lives and to revisit it and maybe find something different about it.
In a letter to w:Galka Scheyer, January 1926; as quoted in I is Style, ed. Siegfried Gohr & Gunda Luyken, NAI Publishers, Rotterdam 2000, p. 34.
1920s
Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha Session, Indore – September, 7-8, 1968
Quotes from ataljee.org
