Quotes About Artistry

When Picasso painted in Paris, was he a Spanish or a French painter? It does not matter, he was Picasso, whatever the influences surrounding him. He simply chose Paris because it was the ideal place for him to sell his creation.

I think an artist's true worth comes through an inter-generational thing - when you go beyond your own time, and start influencing people in a greater way than just what surrounds you.

The Fashion Fund celebrates the real passion that underlies the fashion business, not the frothy world of glamour and celebrity that so often surrounds it.

My core thing is gangster rap, but a lot of my music is melodic and carries a message of survival.

The Beginning of Survival is my best album. I am very proud of it, and I am surprised at it, too. I thought some of Travelogue was a little heavy, but I don't think this is heavy.

For Dylan, it seems, life is always the next gig. Changing pace and location are essential to his survival as an artist.

I feel the only way I can survive is to spend a lot of time writing songs. I have to have incredible, killer songs that also are hits, or I just don't have a chance.

That's why I survived because I still believe I've got something to say.

There's a lot of risk in putting what you suspect you really are into your music.

My proudest moment was the number 'Reviewing the Situation.' I suspect that, because I gave my all to the role and because I was working with such a fine team of people, it inhibited my future career.

I feel like I have a kind of mirror blindness where it's hard for me to characterize or analyze my own work. I suspect I'm not unique in this regard.

I always suspend logic for emotion. If it feels real, or it feels like what I'm going for, we should abandon reality a little bit and go for that. I'm not a documentarian. We're not trying to shoot things for naturalism.

There are good '59 Les Pauls, and there are not-so-good ones. There are ones that are just OK, that don't sustain as well.

Our job in gospel is not going away. It's a sustainable genre. It sells - without question.

I've done a few things on the side here and there, but there is not much reason to do so in a sustained way. I'm generally able to say what I want to say within the context of Weezer.

My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game.

Early on, I tried to sing, but sustaining a note was something I wasn't comfortable with. So I tried to get off of the note as soon as I could.

The song of the blues, the song of the music, was something a lot of people missed out on. They thought they had to swagger a certain way or bark at the mic, and you don't have to do that.

I just asked myself, what piece of that man's soul did he just chew off and swallow to get next week's assignment? You know, just to live, just to work as an artist, or to feed the family?

It's nice to stretch in different directions and use different muscles. You can get swallowed into Hollywood, where it's all about bums on seats and how commercial a film is.

You cannot dance an arabesque in 'Swan Lake' and 'Nutcracker' the same way.

'Swan Lake' is the most difficult thing to portray for a female ballet dancer; it really requires such specific qualities of articulation, agility, strength, and the arm work is something that takes a lot of training.

When I saw the movie 'Black Swan,' I liked the darker aspect of it, the more dramatics, and that's what I like to do for my programs.

It is not that the French are not profound, but they all express themselves so well that we are led to take their geese for swans.