Arthur C. Clarke Art Quotations

There's a passage about 'rivers of molten rock that wound their way... until they cooled and lay like twisted dragon-shapes vomited from the tormented earth.' That's a perfect description: how did Tolkien know, a quarter century before anyone ever saw a picture of Io? Talk about Nature imitating Art.

We always thought the living Earth was a thing of beauty. It isn’t. Life has had to learn to defend itself against the planet’s random geological savagery.

Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll find their work only at art theaters.

The phenomenon of UFO doesn't say anything about the presence of intelligence in space. It just shows how rare it is here on the earth.

No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.

Belief in God is apparently a psychological artifact of mammalian reproduction.

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.

Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?

Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.

The moment when one first meets a great work of art has an impact that can never again be recaptured.

When beauty is universal, it loses its power to move the heart, and only its absence can produce any emotional effect.