Sam: So then what is art? Hally: You want a definition? Sam: Ja. Hally: [He realizes he has got to be… — Athol Fugard
Sam: So then what is art?
Hally: You want a definition?
Sam: Ja.
Hally: [He realizes he has got to be careful. He gives the matter a lot of thought before answering.] Philosophers have been trying to do that for centuries. What is Art? What is Life? But basically I suppose it's... the giving of meaning to matter.
Sam: Nothing to do with beautiful?
Hally: It goes beyond that. It's the giving of form to the formless.
Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
Hally: It’s a bloody awful world when you come to think of it. People can be real bastards.
Sam: That’s the way it is, Hally.
Hally: It doesn’t have to be that way. There is something called progress you know. We don’t exactly burn people at the stake anymore.
p. 13
Don’t talk crap, Hally! You don’t even know what the word ‘sympathy’ means.
Hally: Not many intellectuals are prepared to shovel manure with the peasants then go home and write a ‘little book’ called War and Peace. Incidentally, Sam, he was somebody else who, to quote, ‘…did not distinguish himself scholastically.
p. 20
