If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Emily Dickinson

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

Rebecca West:

Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.

Beverly Sills:

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Diane Ackerman:

Nothing reveals more about the inner life of people than their arts.

Twyla Tharp:

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

Elizabeth Bowen:

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

Rebecca West:

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

Louise Bogan:

True revolutions in art restore more than they destroy.

Rebecca West:

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

Edith Sitwell:

The arts are life accelerated and concentrated.

Nikki Giovanni:

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate a taste.

Margaret Fuller:

Always Art is Art, only by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.

Iris Murdoch:

All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple.

Iris Murdoch:

Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.

Edith Sitwell:

All great art contains an element of the irrational.

Arlene Croce:

A masterpiece doesn’t so much transcend its time as perpetuate it; it keeps its moment alive.

Susan Sontag:

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.