A Quote by Philip Roth

Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism!

Philip Roth

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Philip Roth
American - Novelist
March 19, 1933 - May 22, 2018

Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!

Philip Roth

A passion for his art, and an eager desire to excel, will more than supply an artist with the place of method.

Joshua Reynolds

My idealism is clearly one reason I'm an artist. I see art as one of mankind's more sublime acts, as a vital counterbalance to our base impulses .

Richard Schmid

Nothing would prove more disastrous to our ideas, we contended, than to neglect the effect of the internal upon the external, of the psychological motives and needs upon existing institutions.

Emma Goldman

By denying its musical and artistic merit, hip hop's critics get to have it both ways: they can deny the legitimate artistic standing of rap while seizing on its pervasive influence as an art form to prove what a terrible effect it has on youth.

Michael Eric Dyson

The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker's desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition.

C. S. Lewis

It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.

Ezra Pound

Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production.

Raymond Chandler

Nothing sinister. Just getting exercise. Although some might consider that sinister.

Marian Keyes

Terrible is the temptation to be good.

Bertolt Brecht

Why is it that any time we speak of temptation we always speak of temptation as something that inclines us to wrong. We have more temptations to become good than we do to become bad.

Fulton J. Sheen

If you prove the cause, you at once prove the effect; and conversely nothing can exist without its cause.

Aristotle

Then you know that Sam was the true hero of the tale,' Sayna said. 'That he faced far greater and more terrible foes than he ever should have had to face, and did so with courage. That he went alone into a black and terrible land, stormed a dark fortress, and resisted the most terrible temptation of his world for the sake of the friend he loved. That in the end, it was his actions and his actions alone that made it possible for light to overcome darkness.

Jim Butcher

There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. Horrible as successful artists often are, there is nothing crueler or more vain than a failed artist.

Erica Jong

Contemporary art is based on that an artist is supposed to go into art history in the same way as an art historian. When the artist produces something he or she relates to it with the eye of an art historian/critic. I have the feeling that when I am working it is more like working with soap opera or glamour. It is emotional and not art criticism or history of art.

Odd Nerdrum

There's obviously always danger in making music or art for art's sake. Even as Christians we can be guilty of that, being more about the art than the Artist who gave us this gift.

Steven Curtis Chapman

A Quote by Philip Roth

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