There can be nothing exclusive about substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of the experience of life and thinking about life and living life.
Charles IvesIf a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?
Charles IvesFor the man of talent affects to call his transgressions of the laws of sense trivial and to count them nothing considerd with his devotion to his art.
Charles IvesYou cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.
Charles IvesIf idioms are more to be born than to be selected, then the things of life and human nature that a man has grown up with--(not that one man's experience is better than another's, but that it is 'his.')--may give him something better in his substance and manner than an over-long period of superimposed idiomatic education which quite likely doesn't fit his constitution. My father used to say, 'If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven'
Charles Ives