One thing is certain: the arts keep you alive. They stimulate, encourage, challenge, and, most of all, guarantee a future free from boredom. They allow growth and even demand it in that time of life we call maturity but too often enter it with a childish faith that what we learned in youth is sustenance enough for the years when most men are mentally famished but won't admit it—or when they are apt to curb their hunger with the sops of complacency, security, and the assurance of death.
Interpretation
The arts are essential for personal growth and preventing boredom throughout life.
Vincent Price emphasizes the vital role of the arts in maintaining vitality and encouraging growth as individuals mature. He suggests that engaging with the arts keeps minds stimulated and challenges complacency, rather than allowing people to settle into a monotonous existence, thus highlighting the importance of creativity and self-expression in a fulfilling life.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of arts education in schools.
There's something fascinating about seeing something you don't like at first but directly know you will love—in time. People are that way, all through life. You come against a personality, and it questions yours. You shy away but know there are gratifying secrets there, and the half-open door is often more exciting than the wide.
What's important about an actor is his acting, not his life.
I trust people who are violent about art, as long as they aren't closed-minded. But, unfortunately, most art blowhards are also art bigots.
We may all be a peculiar lot...often broke, often dissatisfied because we're not doing more and better work...but we know how to have a ball that makes the rest of the world seem square.
In art, religion, and politics the respect must be mutual, no matter how violent the disagreement.
I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don't talk about that, that itself is a political thing.
It's a choice - there are two different sorts of photographer: those obsessed with the technicalities and those obsessed by the subject.
For such is the fate of parody: it must never fear exaggerating. If it strikes home, it will only prefigure something that others will then do without a smile--and without a blush--in steadfast virile seriousness.
The essence of dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it's simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves.
Art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand.
Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.