#commonplace

I don't know what people find or like in me, I'm hopelessly commonplace! Current appreciation of my work is a bit highbrow, I've always considered myself a popular artist. ↗

— Maxfield Parrish

#appreciation #artist #bit #commonplace #considered

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#chains-of-events #commonplaces-of-existence #cross-purposes #fiction #on-fiction

For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting. ↗

— David Antin

#centuries #circles #commonplace #like #literary

In my plays I want to look at life - at the commonplace of existence-as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time. ↗

— Christopher Fry

#corner #first #first time #had #i

Life holds one great but quite commonplace mystery. Though shared by each of us and known to all, seldom rates a second thought. That mystery, which most of us take for granted and never think twice about, is time. ↗

— Michael Ende

#commonplace #each #granted #great #holds

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too. ↗

— Brian Eno

#commonplace #earth #easiest #easiest thing #editing

If the arts are held up solely as a means of social insight, fantasy is denied the chance to be commonplace and reality the chance to be exotic. ↗

— Richard Eyre

#chance #commonplace #denied #exotic #fantasy

Let us dig our furrow in the fields of the commonplace. ↗

— Jean Henri Fabre

#dig #fields #let us #our #us

Standing ovations have become far too commonplace. What we need are ovations where the audience members all punch and kick one another. ↗

— George Carlin

#audience #audience members #become #commonplace #far

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature. ↗

— Jean Cocteau

#commonplace #did #done #effect #freshness