Art and Literature

• "Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere" - ILN, 5/5/28.
• "The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms" - Shaw, 1909.
• "The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs" - Chapter 16, Heretics, 1905.
• "Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. but the artists find it harder" - ILN, 11/25/05.
• "The beautification of the world is not a work of nature, but a work of art, then it involves an artist" Ð ILN 9-18-09.
• "By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece." - "On Detective Novels" Generally Speaking.
• "And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads" - Charles Dickens.
• "The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say" - Daily News.4-22-05.

Extracted from "American Chesterton Society"-

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