Decorative Quotes - page 3

Whether we are writing prose or verse we must never use language in a merely decorative way, every qualifying word, every adjective and adverb must be carefully inspected & weighed before it is used and ask before its use, is it really necessary. (Vernon Scannell)
And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything. View quote
Josef Albers
I wanted a decorative pot to keep my hose in. View quote
Gina Barberi
If you can say a thing with one stroke, unanswerably you have style if not, you are at best a marchande de plaisir, a decorative litt. View quote
George Bernard Shaw
Iconic clothing has been secularized.... A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent. View quote
Angela Carter
I think that for me any picture that works even if it is in the guise of pure color application, if it works, involved drawing. That is falt space on a flat surface. And for me, and I always say this, whether it's a Titian or a [Kenneth] Noland, the ones that come off work in that depth and the color perhaps it is divine and the thing that makes it work, but it is line color. If it doesn't work then it's decorative or dead or just applied colors on a surface. That's what wallpaper is. And that's the difference between the striped wallpaper and a great Noland. View quote
Helen Frankenthaler
[with painting] directly tube against canvas, one soon becomes too slick... I regretfully realized that my composition was reduced to no more than a series of coloured rhythms, harmonious, discordant, monotonous and that, from simplification to simplification, I was falling into the trap of decoration. I no longer got to the bottom of things: I no longer cut through to their heart. The decorative spirit was leading me to forget painting. View quote
Maurice de Vlaminck
To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up. View quote
George Orwell
There is a saying in the Islands. Beware the women of the warrior class, for all they touch is both decorative and deadly.-Yuki. View quote
Tamora Pierce
Our duty, Richard, is to be decorative and stay alive long enough to be promoted. But no one expects us to be useful! Good God! A junior officer being useful? That'll be the day. View quote
Bernard Cornwell
In garden arrangement, as in all other kinds of decorative work, one has not only to acquire a knowledge of what to do, but also to gain some wisdom in perceiving what it is well to let alone. (Gertrude Jekyll)
... a metaphor... is like lying but more decorative. View quote
Terry Pratchett
The amazing activity of the cat is delicately balanced by his capacity for relaxation. Every household should contain a cat, not only for decorative and domestic values, but because the cat in quiescence is medicinal to irritable, tense, tortured men and women. View quote
William Lyon Phelps
It is the greatest injustice done to Piet Mondrian that people who are plastically blind see only decorative design instead of the plastic perfection which characterizes his work. The whole De Stijl group from which Mondrian's art was derived must be considered a protest against such blindness. View quote
Piet Mondrian
At present, culture is decorative rather than structural; although it may lift the spirits ... The Lean Economy, in contrast, will depend for its existence on a deep foundation in culture. It is possible to live without it, but only for a time, like holding your breath under water. View quote
David Fleming