Quotes About Artistry

I like to say we can make anything in wood.

I've always worked with different mediums whether it's melting gold to make teeth, working with wood and paint or bending sound in a music studio.

There's a real hunger to understand where objects come from, how artists show their understanding of materials. And there's something fascinating about watching people work, whether it's someone engraving a gun or sewing beautiful clothes together. I know that myself; I'll make a piece of furniture and feel the wood's grain talking to me.

I have always loved wood. Every piece is different. It gets better with age and it has a certain character all of its own.

I feel like everything you learn as an actor growing up is wrong. You're supposed to hit your mark, find your light and know your lines. Those are all things that just make things wooden, dull and boring.

Into the Woods,' 'Sweeney Todd' - those were my religion.

I want to literally quit drag and go live in the woods somewhere and write music for my favorite female singers, like Miley Cyrus or Kacey Musgraves. I would love to be able to write music for them and hear these women I admire sing my songs. That would be like doing drag without having to get into drag myself.

I was in my late 20s, in the process of shaping my musical outlook and what I wanted it to be about, when I first encountered Woody Guthrie.

What I'm doing is basically the same as Bob Dylan did with folk songs and Woody Guthrie songs, the same as folk music's always done. I'm not going to sing about ploughing, but I'll write a song that sounds like it should be about ploughing.

I'm a great fan of Woody Allen's movies.

Most people think that I heard Bob Dylan first and got a cap and harmonica. Really, it was Woody Guthrie. He was so influential.

The first songs I learned were 'It Takes a Worried Man' and Woody Guthrie's 'Grand Coulee Dam,' 'Rock Island Line' - those kind of American folk songs that were probably on the edge of blues. After that was Eddie Cochran and Chuck Berry songs. And then I heard Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed and Big Bill Broonzy on the radio.

I like so many different directors: Scorsese, Coppola, Cassavetes, Jarmusch, Gus van Sant, Woody Allen and the greats like Fellini, Bergman, Tarkovsky and among current filmmakers von Trier, Ang Lee, Wong Kar-wai.

I think Woody Allen is Woody Allen, and no matter where he goes he still makes his Woody Allen films.

I would love to work with Dustin Hoffman, John Malkovich, Omar Epps, Martin Scorsese, Josh Mond, Woody Allen, Paul Thomas Anderson, and David O. Russell, just to name a few. Those guys are absolutely brilliant at what they do.

You don't ever really get to know Woody Allen.

I am definitely writing letters to lots of directors in my mind when I'm making a film. I'm chasing Woody Allen and Godard and Milos Forman and all these people.

In a weird way, I never wanted - I don't consider myself a very good writer. I consider myself okay; I don't consider myself great. There's Woody Allen and Aaron Sorkin. There's Quentin Tarantino. I'm not ever gonna be on that level. But I do consider myself a good filmmaker.

I would like to work with people whose films I really like: Walter Salles, Woody Allen, Julio Medem.

I'd still like to work with Woody Allen.

When I'm ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I'm interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.

The word diva to me means doing something supernatural with something natural.

I sing in languages that I speak. So when I'm singing a Schubert song, I know precisely what every word means and, you know, when it was composed and who was the poet and all of that and whether Strauss or Wagner or French Belioz, Duparc or Debussy or whatever.

The elegance and the quality - the talent is always in the literature. I start with the word and I base everything on that. It doesn't make any difference to me.