David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again:

Advertisements have certain formal, legal obligations to truthfulness, but these are broad enough to allow for a great deal of rhetorical maneuvering in the fulfillment of the advertisement’s primary obligation, which is to serve the financial interests of its sponsor. Whatever attempts an advertisement makes to interest and appeal to its readers are not, finally, for the reader’s benefit. And the reader of an ad knows all this, too—that an ad’s appeal is by its very nature calculated—and this is part of why our state of receptivity is different, more guarded, when we get ready to read an ad.

...An ad that pretends to be art is—at absolute best—like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.

H.R. Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture:

Here I must say emphatically: art must never be used to show the validity of Christianity. Rather, the validity of art should be shown through Christianity.

Andrew Stanton, director of WALL-E and Finding Nemo:

I never think about the audience. If someone gives me a marketing report, I throw it away.

Would that more directors showed such “disdain” for audiences, as one “bigwig Hollywood marketer” put it.

Via

George MacDonald, Lilith:

Strange dim memories, which will not abide identification, often, through misty windows of the past, look out upon me in the broad daylight, but I never dream now. It may be, notwithstanding, that, when most awake, I am only dreaming the more! But when I wake at last into that life which, as a mother her child, carries this life in its bosom, I shall know that I wake, and shall doubt no more.