Wallace Stevens Art Quotations

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.

Poetry is the scholar's art.

Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.

Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.

I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.