Art & Creativity Quote by Mason Cooley

A neat little confession, sharpened into a warning: the mind is trained by language, but the appetite is trained by images. Cooley’s split construction makes the hierarchy feel inevitable. “Thought” is something that can be “shaped” slowly, almost artisanally, by books - a medium associated with interiority, patience, argument. “Desires,” though, aren’t reasoned into; they’re induced, triggered, cued. Pictures don’t “shape” them so much as aim them.

The line lands because it refuses nostalgia without abandoning it. Cooley isn’t simply praising books and dunking on pictures; he’s admitting complicity. The verb choice matters: “has been shaped” suggests a long education, a life in sentences. “My desires by pictures” reads like a shrug at a different kind of schooling, one that bypasses deliberation and goes straight to the body. The parallel syntax is the joke and the sting: two forces, two selves, cohabiting uneasily.

Context helps: Cooley wrote as television consolidated its power and advertising perfected the art of attaching longing to surfaces. A mid-century writer watching the culture pivot from print authority to visual persuasion would notice how quickly images colonize what we want, even when our beliefs remain bookish. The subtext is personal and political: if books build frameworks for thinking, pictures build markets for wanting. The line isn’t anti-image so much as pro-awareness - a compact argument that modern agency depends on recognizing who is authoring your inner life, and in what medium.