"Once we start collecting, the more you have, the more it gets valuable and that will stop us from responding to the present and taking on new ideas what the artists are doing now." -- David Elliott
David ("Smoky") Elliott (1923–1999) was a Newfoundland and Labrador poet.
Born in Garnish, Newfoundland, Elliott worked as a telegraph operator as a young man. He served in World War II, and entered Memorial University of Newfoundland at the age of 25, where he studied English and won numerous awards for scholarship.
After a varied career, Elliott became an English professor at the Sir Wilfred Grenfell College campus of Memorial University, where he taught from 1975 to 1989.
Although his poetry appeared in several anthologies, it was not until 1988 that a volume of Elliott's own work was published, The Edge of Beulah. Perhaps his best-known poem is Didymus on Saturday, in which he imagines St. Thomas's reflections the day after the Crucifixion.
"The educator and the public need to have an opportunity to discuss why certain art is important.""Unless you are a born connoisseur of art, you will not be able to judge by yourself why certain art is superior to other art.""We are concerned with the relationship between art and life. Contemporary art is only intelligible in terms of its relationship to our life.""We may not like our times or many aspects of the time we live in but that is not the fault of art as such.""We want people to experience art and think about it. The art reflects our time, it is about our culture."