Better Quotes

The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

The person who knows one thing and does it better than anyone else, even if it only be the art of raising lentils, receives the crown he merits. If he raises all his energy to that end, he is a benefactor of mankind and its rewarded as such.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Celebrity doesn't have anything to do with art or craft. It's about being rich and thinking that you're better than everybody else.

Art is the collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

I maintain that if you're a novelist and you go into an art museum, you'll come out a better novelist. And if you paint a picture for an hour you're a better actor at the end of it.

Making art, good art, is always a struggle. It can make you happy when you pull it off. There's no better feeling. It's beauteous. But it's always about hard work and inspiration and sweat and good ideas.

Writers want to summarize: What does this mean? What did we learn from this? That's a very 19th-century way of thinking about art, because it assumes that it should make our lives better or teach us something.

I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth, or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music.

I've always liked traveling around Europe and seeing the architecture. The buildings in capital cities have been there for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Some look better than the new ones.

Good satire comes from anger. It comes from a sense of injustice, that there are wrongs in the world that need to be fixed. And what better place to get that well of venom and outrage boiling than a newsroom, because you're on the front lines.

To rule one's anger is well; to prevent it is better.

A comfortable old age is the reward of a well-spent youth. Instead of its bringing sad and melancholy prospects of decay, it would give us hopes of eternal youth in a better world.

No man is ever old enough to know better.

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.

Why should 20-year-olds only be considered sexy? I think we get better with age.

Situational unawareness in the private marketplace or on the battlefield will cost you your livelihood or your life. In the Age of Obama, however, such willful ignorance is a job prerequisite. The less you know the better.

We're taught at such a young age that you can always be better and that you're never perfect and that you're never good enough.

When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.

Even though Jack Kennedy and I were about the same age and lived in the same neighborhood and attended the same elementary school, our paths seldom crossed during the years he lived in Brookline. I'm sure that in time, I would have gotten to know him better if he hadn't moved away.

Right up until the time I retired at age 37, I felt like there were still things that I could do better.

The quicker we get rid of the lobby system the better for all of us. I don't think in this day and age it is tenable to have these nods and winks, and on-the-record and off-the-record briefings.

It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not?

Losing both parents at a young age gave me a sense that you can't really control life - so you'd better live it while it's here. I stopped believing in a storybook existence a long time ago. All you can do is push in a direction and see what comes of it.

One of my grandfathers, actually, having gone out there as a minister, decided he would better serve the people as a doctor. So at a very late age - at the age of 38 in fact - he changed course and decided to become a doctor.

Every age, after all, must have its own aisling and dream of a better, kinder, happier, shared world.

So, not only am I panicking over the weekend if I need to know my lines, but also if can I get the kids to the zoo. Can I even go to church? I was asking for certain things that would allow me to plan my life a little better.

It's hard 'coz you have got different time zones; you can't sleep and y'know, it's boring way for the show to happen, but you do off the stage. Y'know, onstage it's all better.