Quotes About Art

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces... So it is important to fashion ones work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life.

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down... some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

See, that's nothing but blues, that's all I'm singing about. It's today's blues.

In the past, art was admired and revered from afar. Today, there is more of an interactive relationship between the art and the person who admires it.

When I was a kid, toe dancing and toe shoes had a meaning in our culture as a serious kind of art.

The novelist is the vestigial bone on the body cinema. We're like the little toe that can be cut off.

I had to read up on the Freemasons, about secret societies, and dip my toe into art history.

I mean, movies are like your kids or your fingers and toes or something, it's pretty hard to pick favorites.

The process of editing is what I enjoy most - putting the pieces together and making sense out of them.

When creativity melds together with global issues, I believe you can bring the world together.

It's the music that brings us together.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

My songwriting process, and maybe loads of other people's, is just this sort of smashing together of emotions and stuff to make some music. It's kind of simple and really complex at the same time and, as you can see, incredibly hard to explain.

It used to be that comic strips were the big thing, and comic books were toilet paper.

Never give an artist like me carte blanche: he would think it's simply toilet paper.

The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely.

In a sense, 'Schmidt' is the most Omaha of my films. But have I gotten it right? I'm not sure. Did Fellini get Rome right? Did Ozu get Tokyo right?

I have no favorite museum, but it could be the National Gallery in London; it could be the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Every city has a great museum.

Tokyo is wonderful for distribution of international films, a lot of Iranian films, Taiwanese films. But most of the art films are from Europe and Asia.

When I first set out to make movies, that's what I thought I was going to do - make movies that mean something. And each movie had its own message, some stronger than others. Even 'X-Men' has its own message of tolerance.

A large part of the creative process is tolerating the gap between the glorious image you had in your mind and the sad thing you've just made.

I'm the first to admit that I can't be as good as Tolkien, and a movie can never be as good as Tolkien.

I have been illustrating Tolkien's books ever since I first read them, long before illustration became my profession.