Quotes About Meaning

What's my dilemma here? Am I making entertainment or am I making art? What am I saying? At the end of the day, cinema is entertainment for millions of people, but for me it's expression.

It is one of the ironies of biographical art that some details are more relevant than others, and many details have no relevance at all.

The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance.

I don't know a single collector or museum director who says: 'Oh, he's on a list, so I think I'll buy something of his.' The people who buy my art put a little more thought into it than that.

A good piece of art raises questions.

Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?

Lexicography is a chastening as well as an illuminating and fascinating art.

I heard someone say he [Carl Sandburg] was the kind of writer who had everything to gain and nothing to lose by being translated into another language.

Without art there is no hope.

Agreeing on the "why" takes all the romance out of everything, takes all the seduction. Seduction used to be an art. Now of course it's brutish and it's predatory and it's bad.

Art forms render ideas accessible to readers who could not receive those insights in any other format.

Art itself is underserved when we don't realize the power of it.

Art isn't and shouldn't be responsible. If it is, it isn't functioning as art.

Family is the best. I can honestly say, it's a gift that is beyond making art. I didn't know that when I got into it.

Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?

I think if art has one underlying value, it's that.

There are films that can only be made in a specific country but that have a wider meaning. I think that's true of any art form.

What art does is it makes you feel alive and makes you feel like you're connected.

Art can sometimes be separate from the artist.

I have always considered the aesthetic of a project, including press photos, as a means to further the message of the art itself.

If art depended on content, then one painting of an apple would be as good as the next one.

Don't burden art with words and ideas. Art comes from a deeper place.

The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.