Robert Hughes quotes - page 2

Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre. (Robert Hughes)
But the Japanese paper was what I loved, and now, so many years later, when I see some exquisitely laid piece of calligraphy by a student of Ogata Korin in a museum, I think first not of the spiritualized handwork of Momoyama Japan, but of those long evenings in the family garage with Dad, smoothing and stretching the refined wing coverings of those planes. View quote
Robert Hughes
Some new works of art have values of some kind or another. Others, the majority, have little or none. But newness as such, in art, is never a value. View quote
Robert Hughes
...A column is not merely a round stick of stone: it is part of an entire symbolic system, which one cannot intuit simply by looking at it in isolation. The basic reason for studying such things is not merely technical or archivally historical but humanistic; it is to seek out the answer to what someone like Vitruvius meant by his (to us) mysterious comment that "a building should have the proportions of a man," View quote
Robert Hughes
Enforced solitude, as in solitary confinement, is a terrible and disorienting punishment, but freely chosen solitude is an immense blessing. To be out of the rattle and clang of quotidian life, to be away from the garbage of other people's amusements and the overflow of their unwanted subjectivities, is the essential escape. Solitude is, beyond question, one of the worlds great gifts and an indispensable aid to creativity, no matter what level that creation may be hatched at. View quote
Robert Hughes
The best thing fishing taught me, I think was how to be alone. Without this ability no writer can really survive or work, and there is a strong relationship between the activity of the fisherman, letting his line down into unknown depths in the hope of catching an unseen prey (which may be worth keeping, or may not) and that of a writer trolling his memory and reflections for unexpected jags and jerks of association. View quote
Robert Hughes
We all come into the world with baggage which, in the end, we have no hope of reclaiming, The main item in mine was my father. View quote
Robert Hughes
Our culture puts enormous emphasis on "socialization", on the supposedly supreme virtues of establishing close relations with others. View quote
Robert Hughes
In the real world, mice do exist and they generally go about their business whether we see them or not. View quote
Robert Hughes
The truly radical work of art is the one that offers you something to hold on to in the midst of the flux of possibility. View quote
Robert Hughes
How immeasurably fortunate my father was in his faith! (Robert Hughes)
Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world. View quote
Robert Hughes
Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art. View quote
Robert Hughes
Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius. View quote
Robert Hughes
Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel. View quote
Robert Hughes
If the making of the series had one repeated phrase that still echoes in my head, it was not heard on the soundtrack; the inexorable voice of Lorna Pegram, the producer, muttering: "It's a clever argument, Bob dear, but what are we supposed to be looking at?" View quote
Robert Hughes
New Song rapidly accumulated a nucleus of talent, and its best-known group was Els Setze Jutges, The Sixteen Judges, whose odd-sounding name came from a phrase used as a password by Catalan patriot troops during the rising against and occupation army in 1640 during the Reapers' War: "Setze jutges d'un jutjat menjen fetge d'un penjat" ("Sixteen judges on a tribunal eat the liver of a hanged man"). No lisping Castilian, it was believed, could pronounce this barrage of fricatives. View quote
Robert Hughes
So fishing contributed to an important lesson of my life -how to be alone. I still think solitude is one of the world's great gifts. "Se sei solo," wrote Leonardo da Vinci, "sarai tutto tuo" View quote
Robert Hughes
The past is pervasive; it seeps into everything;... And yet because the past is irreplaceable and cannot be done again, it was that very past, not the present or the future, that was so delicate, so vulnerable, so dreadfully easy to erase. View quote
Robert Hughes
If Australia had not been settled as a prison and built by convict labor, it would have been colonized by other means; that was foreordained from the moment of Cook's landing at Botany Bay in 1770. But it would have taken half a century longer, for Georgian Britain would have found it exceptionally difficult to find settlers crazy or needy enough to go there of their own free will. View quote
Robert Hughes