Rebecca West Art Quotations

But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.

Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn.

Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.

The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.

What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience.

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.

whatever a work of art may be, the artist certainly cannot dare to be simple. He must have a nature as complicated and as violent, as totally unsuggestive of the word innocence, as a modern war.

Bad art is maintained by the neurotic, who is deadly afraid of authentic art because it inspires him to go on living, and he is terrified of life.

art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe.

There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.

works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.

Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.

A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.

There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the life of society.

I cannot see that art is anything less than a way of making joys perpetual.

The earth itself is slightly resistant to routine.

every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.

the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.

Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.