Quotes About Artistry

Every new writing project, every new artistic project, needs to be protected so it can grow on its own before it begins to creep out into the world.

The reason I do interviews is because I'm protecting my songs.

A lot of my business is about protecting creativity.

All actors are protecting something, in their own way, that happens in front of a camera.

When people don't like the film, I can take a bullet. I don't mind you talking about me, but I'm protective of my actors, because they bared their soul for me.

I try to make all my songs good. I don't ever write one to finish one. A lot of protest songs end up that way, driven by some kind of emotional response.

The first album is a classic record and I think the prototype of a sound that no one else does.

To me, 'Educating Rita' is the most perfect performance I could give of a character who was as far away from me as you could possibly get and of all the films I have ever been in, I think it may be the one I am most proud of.

My first album was called 'Badlands,' and it's something that I think I'm most proud of having done in my life.

If we're going to be considered horror filmmakers, we have to prove it not only to ourselves but to the audience that we can actually make something scary.

I hope that I can make good music out of whatever genre I go into. Just to prove to myself that I can.

On 'Heartbreaker,' I had to sing those songs. I drank the way I did those songs. I ate the way I did those songs. I communicated the way I did those songs. With 'Gold,' I was trying to prove something to myself. I wanted to invent a modern classic.

Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem.

I had to see if I'm a real filmmaker. I mean, I have proven myself in movies and franchises, but am I an artist? Can I contribute something to a medium that I love so much?

The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame will provide a center where the lives and the artistry of the greatest jazz musicians will be celebrated, and where people will come to learn about jazz, something to which my brother devoted his life's work.

The thing is, baby, you don't have long,' he said. 'We don't have long. Dancers are like dragonflies – in one day, dead in the water the next. So you just have to work, all the time, because if you don't love it, and if you don't want to do it so much that it's like breathing to you, then you might as well stop now.

I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon ; I had had my finger in the great, succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening — of Browning's renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo's tube, spumed the friars, with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair-splitting speech.

I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon; I was a man of Renaissance that evening- of Browning's renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo's tube, spurned the friars, with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair-splitting speech.

Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter - as indissolubly as if they were conceived together…. - The Crack-Up

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.

If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter--as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.

Writers aren't exactly people.... They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.

There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.