Quote

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

Rebecca West

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Rebecca West
Age: 90 †
Born: 1892
Born: December 21
Died: 1983
Died: March 15
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Suffragette
Writer
London
England
Cicely Isabel Fairfield
Dame Cicely Isabel Fairfield
Start
Artist
Art
Women
Authentic
Must
Critics
Work
Criticism
Argument
Audience

More quotes by Rebecca West

Image
Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.
Rebecca West
Image
the law, like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience.
Rebecca West
Image
It isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.
Rebecca West
Image
The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
Rebecca West
Image
There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.
Rebecca West
Image
Marriage had certain commercial advantages. By it the man secures the exclusive right to the woman's body and by it, the woman binds the man to support her during the rest of her life.... A more disgraceful bargain was never struck.
Rebecca West
Image
I've never gone anywhere where the men have come up to my infantile expectations. I always have gone through life constantly being surprised by the extreme, marvelous qualities of a small minority of men. But I can't see the rest of them. They seem awful rubbish.
Rebecca West
Image
Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.
Rebecca West
Image
Anthologies are mischievous things. Some years ago there was a rage for chemically predigested food, which was only suppressed when doctors pointed out that since human beings had been given teeth and digestive organs they had to be used or they degenerated very rapidly. Anthologies are predigested food for the brain.
Rebecca West
Image
one of Mr. [Thomas] Hardy's ancestors must have married a weeping willow. There are pages and pages in his collected poems which are simply plain narratives in ballad form of how an unenjoyable time was had by all.
Rebecca West
Image
But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.
Rebecca West
Image
To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.
Rebecca West
Image
There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped.
Rebecca West
Image
I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind the right hand has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships. I don't complain, because I think my left hand's power, as much as it has, is due to its knowledge of what my right hand is doing.
Rebecca West
Image
There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.
Rebecca West
Image
The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.
Rebecca West
Image
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
Rebecca West
Image
Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
Rebecca West
Image
Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep.
Rebecca West
Image
Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
Rebecca West