Artistic Endeavor Quotes

“A naked lunch is natural to us
We eat reality sandwiches.
But allegories are so much lettuce.
Don't hide the madness.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“He was no god, just an artist; and when an artist is a man, he needs a woman to create like a god.”
― Roman Payne

“As far as I know, every person has a dream. Every person is a born artist.”
― Neeraj Agnihotri, Procrasdemon - The Artist's Guide to Liberation from Procrastination

“Deep inside, we are all artists who can't find the crayons that were given to us in playschool.”
― Neeraj Agnihotri, Procrasdemon - The Artist's Guide to Liberation from Procrastination

“Men who create art feel a zillion times happier than men who create wealth.
Art lives on but wealth diminishes.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes

“I chose and my world was shaken. So what. The choice might have been mistaken, but choosing was not.”
― Stephen Sondheim "Sunday in the Park with George"

“Explore the wonders of different shades of colours. It is purely lovely.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!

“An artistic person taps into the destructive emotional energy of guilt and shame and the longing to love and be loveable and transforms these powerful emotions into a creative force.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“All writers are demonic dreamers. Writing is an act of sharing experiences and offering of an individualistic perspective of our private attitudes pertaining to whatever topics of thought intrigues the author. Writing is a twitchy art, which attempts to employ linguist building blocks handed-down from past generations. Writers’ word choices form a structure of conjoined sentences when overlaid with the lingua of modern culture. Writers attempt to emulate in concrete form the synesthesia of our personal pottage steeped in our most vivid feelings. Writing a personal essay calls for us to sort out a jungle of lucid observations and express in a tangible technique our unique interpretation of coherent observations interlaced with that effusive cascade of yearning, the universal spice of unfilled desire, which turmoil of existential angst swamps us.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Philosophers wonder when they do not know, artists when they do.”
― Raheel Farooq

“I have a transgressive spirit, and Pop is transgression's best friend.”
― Nuno Roque

“Fascinated by the great symbols of the collective history, I use them as an alphabet to communicate.”
― Nuno Roque

“Witnessing the panoply of beauty in all of nature takes us out of our shell of self-absorption and makes us realize that we are merely bit players in the game of life. Witnessing the majesty of beauty confirms that the real show lies outside us to observe and appreciate and not inside us to transfix us. True beauty charms us into seeing the grandeur of goodness that surrounds us and by doing so, the pristine splendor of nature releases us from wallowing in the poverty of our self-idealization. The bewitching spell cast by the exquisiteness of nature levitates our souls and transforms our psyche. When we see, hear, taste, smell, or touch what is beautiful, we cannot suppress the urge to replicate its baffling texture by singing, dancing, painting, or writing. Opening our eye to the loveliness of a single flower is how we stay in touch with the glorious pageantry of living.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“What exactly is it you'd like to know? [the book store manager asked]. He had an odd expression, like he was asking her a trick question. [Katherine] thought a minute. What DID she want to know? Why had she taken the trouble to come out in the cold to learn about a woman she'd never heard of until yesterday? She had that feeling she got when she was doing her art and suddenly discovered the missing piece that ties everything together: a tingling in the back of her neck, a crazy buzzed-rush of a feeling that spread through her whole body. She didn't understand the role that Sara Harrison Shea, the ring Gary had given her, or the book he had hidden would play, but she knew that this was important, and that she had to give herself over to it and see where it might lead.”
― Jennifer McMahon, The Winter People

“An author’s operating charter is to unearth embedded symbols that reflect complementary and inconsistent relationships of our collective assemblage, combine harmonizing and contradictory conceptions that motivate us, and delve larger truths out of variable and erratic elements of human nature.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A person living an artistic existence refuses to surrender to the winds of time, continues singing and dancing into the teeth of the harshest storm, and marvels in all of the delightful treasures of simply being.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The human brain acts as a mere transducer of electrical energy. Our senses are on full alert when we are in danger. In contrast, when we are relatively safe and secure, our senses tend to slumber, making the world pass by analogous to a fuzzy dream composed of meaningless impressions. Inner turmoil causes energy surges in the brain. A spontaneously convulsing brain is an artistic brain. It is useful to write whenever one is in pain or feeling particularly introspective. Trauma awakens us from a sedated life. A clicked on brain displays greater sensitivity to the synesthetic perceptions that fill life with a diversity of sounds, colors, tastes, tactile feelings, and odors.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Art is the newly sprung river that keeps flowing at its own pace, based on its own unconditional knacks, passion, and its nature. Nature itself is art, and as such, art can be found in everything that belongs to nature. And in the world we live, there is nothing that doesn't belong to nature, for everything is nature, hence, everything is art. Even science is art, when it flows pure and free - literature is art, when it flows pure and free - mathematics is art, when it flows pure and free. Any act of the mind that flows pure and free, is art, for freedom is the soul of art.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Lives to Serve Before I Sleep

“That a work of creation struggles and insistently demands to be brought into being is a fact that no genuine artist would think of denying.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers

“Nothing I do is natural, realistic, organic or accidental. I'm never spontaneous, I'm completely premeditated.”
― Nuno Roque

“The philosophical study of beauty, art, and the splendor of nature nurtures a person’s fertile mind by exposing a person to the puzzling world of the beautiful, elegant, ugly, and grotesque. Human beings ability to experience sublime pleasure emanates from a variety of sensory experiences and a person’s ability to make discriminatory observations and judgment in taste and sentiment.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Every act of art is a good faith attempt to arrest time – the motion of life – and make contact with other human beings.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“All forms of art must contribute to the discursive dialogue regarding the composition of the malleable human condition.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Storytelling gives form to the metal dialogue of the mind and in doing so, reveals our self-fiction. Memory and imagination fills part of the space and time dimensions that we live in. We use memory and imagination to write stories in order to bridge our fear of nothingness and offset our trepidation of paddling into the river of insanity. We write into the heart of darkness and flirt with oblivion in order to ascribe meaning to our lives and to immortalize the people who we love.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“We do not use writing exclusively to attain perspective upon our self-referential human existence. We dedicate our essayistic existence to witnessing the variegated acts of life. Our craniums serve as a personal planetarium, a full-dome personal theater where we can replay video and audio educational films documenting our scented and tactile observations. We feature recollections of evocative experiences, vivid daydreams, and frightful nightmares. A vast array of scientific visualizations and artistic depictions supplement our personal slideshow, knowledge we employ to frame our evolving self under the celestial sky and navigate our earthy existence.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Art is long. Life is short, but it deserves our attentive devotion. Embrace life. No person has a monopoly on wisdom. Despite the plethora of written books and e-books covering virtually every imaginable subject, advances in human knowledge and changes in the physical environment will cause recurrent alterations in the human condition that writers are uniquely able to express, explain, explicate, and elucidate. The complexities of human life demand humanistic persons to explore and offer guidance and solace to troubled souls. The world is not in the need of any more corporate entities devoted to milling money. What the world needs is writers, singers, poets, and philosophers whom can expand upon the universal desire to display an intense and absorbing respect for life and honor the principles of truthfulness and charity in human relations. I wish for every person to cull the lyrical prose from their stroll in the meadow of life and express the vivacity of their inner daemon in whatever artistic methodology stirs their imagination and voices their uniqueness. I call upon each person to use logic, intuition, and imagination to share all their adventures in this world of rocks and stones, earth and sky, sunshine and rain. Splash it out there for everyone to witness your appreciativeness of nature’s glory, verification of your meaningful existence demands that you settle for nothing less.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Most artists wish to receive acclaim for a body of work that will withstand the test of time. Ancient Greece culture produced many works of fiction, history, mythology, drama, and philosophy that scholars consider timeless classics. The classics of Ancient Greece greatly influenced the development of Western Civilization.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The work of the artist is to depict humankind and nature for how it actually is. Life as well as the written words of many learned writers teaches us about the world. We develop an orderly and differentiated system of personal consciousness by responding to the world, organizing, and integrating our accumulated knowledge gained via evocative personal experiences and through reading the shared thoughts of writers, philosophers, scientists, and other erudite thinkers.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A true artist does not ever stop creating art!”
― Avijeet Das

“For me, and for so many of us, creativity is a direct springboard to much that is positive in life. It is the catalyst to becoming energetic, vibrant, joyful, generous individuals and contributors to society.”
― Ellen Palestrant, Have You Ever Had a Hunch? The Importance of Creative Thinking