The Arts Quotes

If we are to act as salt and light in contemporary society, we cannot afford to bypass the darkened theatre and the silver screen.

That the world ‘swarms with male and female scum’ is perfectly true. Human nature is imperfect. But to think that the task of literature is to gather the pure grain from the muck heap is to reject literature itself. Artistic literature is called so because it depicts life as it really is. It aims at truth – unconditional and honest. A writer is not a confectioner, not a dealer in cosmetics, not an entertainer; he is a man bound by compulsion, by the realization of his duty and by his conscience.

Art, in a sense, is a revolt against everything fleeting and unfinished in the world. Consequently, its only aim is to give another form to a reality that it is nevertheless forced to preserve as the source of its emotion. In this regard we are all realistic, and no one is.

The invention of the arts, and other things which serve the common use and convenience of life, is a gift of God by no means to be despised, and a faculty worthy of commendation.

There remains with us the feeling that all poetry and all intellectual life were once the handmaids of the holy, and have passed through the temple.

I was filled with such sweet panic and anguish of longing for I had no idea what that I knew my life could never be complete until I found it… It was the upward-reaching and fathomlessly hungering, heart-breaking love for the beauty of the world at its most beautiful, and, beyond that, for that beauty east of the sun and west of the moon which is past the reach of all but our most desperate desiring and is finally the beauty of Beauty itself, of Being itself and what lies at the heart of Being.

Faith and fiction both journey forward in time and space and draw their life from the journey, are in fact the journey. Faith and fiction both involve the concrete, the earthen, the particular more than they do the abstract and cerebral. In both, the people you meet along the way, the things that happen, the places–the airport bar, the room where you have your last supper with a friend–count for more than ideas do. Fiction can hold opposites together simultaneously like love and hate, laughter and tears, despair and hope, and so of course does faith which by its very nature both sees and does not see and whose most characteristic utterance, perhaps, is “Lord i believe, help thou my unbelief.

Creation is not a hurdle on the road to God, it is the road itself.

Who will write us new laws of harmony? We have no further use for well-tempered clavichords. We ourselves are too much dissonance.

Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our consciousness in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.