A Quote by Philip Larkin

But, o, photography! as no art is,Faithful and disappointing! That recordsDull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,And will not censor blemishes,Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards

Philip Larkin

Quote Topics

Art Art Is Boards Censor Days Disappointing Dull Dull Days Faithful Hall Hold Like Lines Photography Smiles Washing Will

Quote Author

Philip Larkin
English - Novelist
August 9, 1922 - December 2, 1985

But O, Photography! as no art is, Faithful and disappointing!

Philip Larkin

you are on the freeway threading through traffic now, moving both towards something and towards nothing at all as you punch the radio on and get Mozart, which is something, and you will somehow get through the slow days and the busy days and the dull days and the hateful days and the rare days, all both so delightful and so disappointing because we are all so alike and so different.

Charles Bukowski

Music is art to me, and you don't censor art. You don't go into a museum and censor things.

Iggy Azalea

Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me.

William Eggleston

Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.

Saul Bellow

Sport crosses party lines and ethnic lines. It occupies a greater realm, and it's all the more disappointing when sports figures turn out to be like everyone else.

Philip Kerr

Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.

H. L. Mencken

Has it led you to the conclusion that photography is an art ? Or it is simply a means of recording ? "I'm glad you asked that. I've been wanting to say this for years. Is cooking an art ? Is talking an art ? Is even painting an art ? It is artfulness that makes art, not the medium itself. Of course photography is an art - when it is in the hands of artists."

Aaron Scharf

I collect art on a very modest scale. Most of what I have is photography because I just love it and it makes me happy and it looks good in my home. I also have a pretty big collection of art books mainly, again, on photography. A lot of photography monographs, which is great because with photography, the art itself can be reproduced quite well in book form.

Chris Parnell

Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

Susan Sontag

There is more in art, with an apology to that much abused word, as applied to photography, than startling display lines, on mounts and signs announcing artist Photographer, Artistic Photography Studio, etc., and the lower the standard the more frantic the claim.

Gertrude Kasebier

There is a lot of social photography being done now to point to the untruth of photography. It's getting very dull now. So, okay photography doesn't tell the truth. So what? Everyone has known this forever.

Abelardo Morell

I never liked photography. Not for the sake of photography. I like the object. I like the photographs when you hold them in your hand.

Robert Mapplethorpe

Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already.

Helmut Newton

There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. It is a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly in one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady?