M. > M.'s Quotes

“It's not a matter of what you deserve -- and more to the point -- certainly not a matter of what you THINK you deserve. All that matters is what you're committed to, and how you honor that commitment, and -- sometimes -- what you are blessed by.”
― M. Allen Cunningham, The Honorable Obscurity Handbook: Solidarity & Sound Advice for Writers and Artists

“Art is long. If we work for ourselves of course we must hurry. If we work for her we must often pause.”
― Henry James

“Being comprehended is the novelist's version of being a part of things.”
― M. Allen Cunningham, The Honorable Obscurity Handbook: Solidarity & Sound Advice for Writers and Artists

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must see him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical criticism...What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it...The poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.”
― T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent: An Essay

“The artist, whom the work of imagination renders at once honoree and outcast, is everywhere and nowhere at home -- and that in itself is belongingness of kinds.”
― M. Allen Cunningham, The Honorable Obscurity Handbook: Solidarity & Sound Advice for Writers and Artists

“Every meaningful cultural act -- wherever it takes place -- is unquestionably good in and of itself, simply because it exists and because it offers something to someone. Yet can this value 'in itself' really be separated from 'the common good'? Is not one an integral part of the other from the start? Does not the bare fact that a work of art has meant something to someone -- even if only for a moment, perhaps to a single person -- already somehow change, however minutely, the overall condition for the better? ... Can we separate the awakening human soul from what it always, already is -- an awakening human community?”
― Václav Havel, Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965-1990

“The true artist is indifferent to the materials and conditions imposed upon him. He accepts any conditions, so long as they can be used to express his will-to-form. Then in the wider mutations of history his efforts are magnified or diminished, taken up or dismissed, by forces which he cannot predict, and which have very little to do with the values of which he is the exponent. It is his faith that those values are nevertheless the eternal attributes of humanity.”
― Herbert Read

“You put something down and you don't know immediately what it is. It has always been like that. ...All you have to know is whether you're lying or whether you're telling the truth, you can't afford to make a mistake about that distinction any longer.”
― John Berger, Here Is Where We Meet: A Story of Crossing Paths