The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see.

- James Baldwin

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.

- Ingmar Bergman

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

- Wolfgang Borchert

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

- Martin Buber

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.

- Fredrick Buechner

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.

- Frederick Buechner

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.

- Jacob Burckhardt

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.

- John Calvin

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.

- Albert Camus

Christianity met the mythological search for romance by being a story, and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story.

- G. K. Chesterton

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

- John Coffey

- T. S. Eliot

When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

- Clifton Fadiman

What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. … It's this in-between that I'm calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one which is really the realm of the artist.

- Federico Fellini

Unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper... education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.

- Robert Frost

Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.

- Franz Kafka

It is one of the greater triumphs of Lucifer that he has managed to make Christians believe that a story is a lie, that a myth should be outgrown with puberty, that to act in a play is inconsistent with true religion.

- Madeleine L'Engle

Unless we are creators, we are not fully alive.

- Madeleine L'Engle

There are earnest people who recommend realistic reading for everyone because, they say, it prepares us for real life, and who would, if they could, forbid fairy-tales for children and romances for adults because they ‘give a false picture of life’—in other words, deceive their readers.

I trust that what has already been said about egoistic castle-building [i.e. the reader lives vicariously as the hero of the story] forearms us against this error. Those who wish to be deceived always demand in what they read at least a superficial or apparent realism of content. To be sure, the show of such realism which deceives the mere castle-builder would not deceive a literary reader. If he is to be deceived, a much subtler and closer resemblance to real life will be required. But without some degree of realism in content—a degree proportional to the reader’s intelligence—no deception will occur at all. No one can deceive you unless he makes you think he is telling the truth. The unblushingly romantic has far less power to deceive than the apparently realistic. Admitted fantasy is precisely the kind of literature which never deceives at all. Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science fiction; they can be deceived by the stories in the women’s magazines. None of us are deceived by the Odyssey, the Kalevala, Beowulf, or Malory. the real danger lurks in sober-faced novels where all appears to be very probable but all is in fact contrived to put across some social or ethical or religious or anti-religious ‘comment on life’. For some at least of such comments must be false. To be sure, no novel will deceive the best type of reader. He never mistakes art either for life or for philosophy. He can enter, while he reads, into each author’s point of view without either accepting or rejecting it, suspending when necessary his disbelief and (what is harder) his belief.

- C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism 67-8

"Creation" as applied to human authorship seems to me an entirely misleading term. We make, we re-arrange elements He has provided. There is not a vestige of real creativity in us. Try to imagine a new primary colour, a third sex, a fourth dimension, or even a monster which does not consist of bits of existing animals stuck together. Nothing happens. And that surely is why our works never mean to others quite what we intended: because we are re-combining elements made by Him and already containing His meanings. Because of those divine meanings in our materials it is impossible we should ever know the whole meaning of our own works, and the meaning we never intended may be the best and truest one.

- C. S. Lewis

It is the immemorial privilege of letter-writers to commit to paper things they would not say; to write in a more grandiose manner than that in which they speak; and to enlarge upon feelings which would be passed by unnoticed in conversation. 

- C. S. Lewis

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

- Thomas Merton

It is the Heart that is not yet sure of its God that is afraid to laugh in His presence.

- George MacDonald

The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock; to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.

– Flannery O’Connor

We lost our innocence in the Fall and our turn to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ's death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite.

- Flannery O'Connor

It seems as if there must be darkness and light, evil and good, in any great human work... Even the most idealistic of great books often dips down into the mud, deep down into that abysmal silt at the bottom of the ocean without which reality would not be reality.

- John Cowper Powys

There are certain cases of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline... reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the spirit.

- Marcel Proust

Far more than any other influence, more than school, more even than home—my attitudes, dreams, preconceptions and preconditions for life had been irreversibly shaped five and a half thousand miles away in a place called Hollywood.

- Dave Puttnam, Producer, Chariots of Fire

We must realize that we Christians are responsible... To look at modern art is to look at the fruit of the spirit of the avant-garde: it is they who are ahead in building a view of the world with no God, no norms. Yet is this so because Christians long since left the field to the world, and, in a kind of mystical retreat from the world, condemned the arts as worldly, almost sinful? Indeed, nowhere is culture more 'unsalted' than precisely in the field of the arts - and that in a time when the arts (in the widest sense) are gaining a stronger influence than ever through the mass communications.

- H. R. Rookmaaker

The goal of glorifying God spares Christian artists ... from either overvaluing or undervaluing their artistic experiences.

- Leland Ryken

When we read the poem, or see the play or picture or hear the music, it is as though a light were turned on us. We say: "Ah! I recognize that! That is something which I obscurely felt to be going on in and about me, but I didn't know what it was and couldn't express it. But now the artist has... imaged it forth... for me, I can possess and take hold of it and make it my own, and turn it into a source of knowledge and strength.

- Dorothy Sayers

Christian art is by no means always religious art, that is, art which deals with religious themes. Consider God the Creator. Is God's creation totally involved with religious subjects? What about the universe? the birds? the trees? What about the bird's song? and the sound of the wind in the trees?

- Francis Schaeffer

The arts, cultural endeavors, enjoyment of the beauty of both God's creation and of man's creativity — these creative gifts have in our day been relegated to the bottom drawer of Christian consciousness, despised outright as unspiritual or unchristian. This deficiency has been the cause of many unnecessary guilt feelings and much bitter fruit, taking us out of touch with the world God has made, with the culture in which we live, and making us ineffectual in that culture.

- Franky Schaeffer

The modern Christian world and what is known as evangelicalism in general is marked, in the area of the arts and cultural endeavor, by one outstanding feature, and that is its addiction to mediocrity.

- Franky Schaeffer

Beauty is the infinite presented in the finite.

- Schelling

The artist needs the theologian to check the exuberance of his vision and rescue it from isolation and subjectivity. The theologian needs the artist to enrich his thinking and rescue it from aridity and irrelevance.

- Patrick Sherry

The key to reading well, I believe, is to read worldviewishly... Doing this helps us grasp not only the particular thoughts and attitudes displayed on the surface of the text but helps us see as well where the author is coming from and why he or she is saying what is being said. It helps us place the author and text in a larger cultural context. The main benefit of reading the best sort of literature, however, is not just to know what someone else is saying and thus pick up information or perspective. It is not even to reinforce one's own particular Christian understanding of God or his creation. The main benefit, rather, is to help us understand who we are as a human family in all our diverse and glorious yet fallen splendor.

- James Sire

We know that all the arts are brothers, that each of them illuminates another, and that a universal light results.

- Voltaire

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

- Simone Weil

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

- Oscar Wilde