9 Tom Stoppard Quotes on Art

Tom Stoppard quotes on art

7. Donner: Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

12. Dotty: Archie says the Church is a monument to irrationality. George: ... The National Gallery is a monument to irrationality! Every concert hall is a monument to irrationality! - and so is a nicely kept garden, or a lover's favour, or a home for stray dogs! You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!

17. To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.

20. When I was at school, on certain afternoons we all had to do what was called Labour - weeding, sweeping, sawing logs for the boiler-room, that sort of thing; but if you had a chit from Matron you were let off to spend the afternoon messing about in the Art Room. Labour or Art. And you've got a chit for life? Where did you get it? What is an artist? For every thousand people there's nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who's the artist.

21. An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships - and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes - husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer.

22. I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you're either a revolutionary or you're not, and if you're not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can't be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary. ... I forget the third thing.

32. I'm showing an interest in your work. I thought you liked me showing an interest in your work. My showing. Save the gerund and screw the whale.

63. It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

66. My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.