Quotes About Art

I suffered a lot from social anxiety, and being on set was really scary to me. That fear can cause limits in your art and your performance because you're not going all in because there is this little thing in your head.

A filmmaker doesn't have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand it. You don't have to die to shoot a death scene.

I have always been interested in how you can depict suffering without being heavy-handed.

I'm attracted to artists like Frida Kahlo, because her work was her life, her questions, her outrage, her suffering, her pain. Everything is in her work.

The creative act is also in a small way a suffering act - we start out with our ego, this hope of making this thing whatever it be, but so often it eludes us and it collapses and we kind of regress into this mental suffering, we can't find what we're looking for.

For one thing, I don't think art needs to be about suffering; sometimes it really seems like it's only the art about pain that is interpreted as profound, and in my work for years I've really tried to deal with subjects that are substantial, not just fluffy, but presented in a more playful, approachable kind of way.

Nothing good gets written without the writer suffering along the way, in my opinion. Writing should be a pleasure, but unless you feel almost broken many, many times in the journey to a novel, you haven't pushed yourself hard enough.

An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more.

A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.

In the late '70s, the conditions that bands had to endure were, shall we say, not as civilized as they are today. People were a lot more aggressive back then. So there was definitely a lot of suffering for your art. But I would argue that was a good thing. Generally, people make better music when they suffer.

The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.

If an artist is driven primarily by social responsibility, I think the art probably suffers because, again, just as leadership has a rather defined end point or purpose, social responsibility would seem to have a very clear moral context.

Wherefore the mere practical architect is not able to assign sufficient reasons for the forms he adopts; and the theoretic architect also fails, grasping the shadow instead of the substance.

For a long time, I was brilliantly achieving drawings that were inert, suffocating and dark. If ever you need illustrations that are inert, suffocating and dark, I know how to do them.

Recently, I looked back at my first manuscripts and was struck by the lack of space, of breath. That's exactly how it felt, back then... like I was suffocating.

Literature is air, and I'm suffocating in mediocrity.

Arts and crafts, or getting to be in a play with people, or making a little short film, that's pure sugar, because the stakes are so low.

Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art .

A work of art can start you thinking about some aesthetic or philosophical problem; it can suggest some new method, some fresh approach to fiction.

My own position is, that it is largely up to the work itself to suggest the nature of these referential points without dimensions in and through the processes by which the distance between them is maintained.

I love and collect contemporary art and go to all the art fairs. I love Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney. I grew up in Italy and had a humanistic education in philosophy and literature - things I love and appreciate. People are richer and more complex than just their day-to-day professional pursuits might suggest.

Escapism always has its place, but when movies connect to other things around us and suggest implications that haven't been considered before, that's a dividend, too, even when our love of movies becomes complicated as a result.

My fascination with women's clothes began very early. My mother was a very fashionable woman. She also made her own clothes. She had these fashion magazines, and I would draw the women in them. My middle school art teacher suggested that I have a fashion drawing show.

The world of art, I have suggested, is full of fakes. Fake originality, fake emotion and the fake expertise of the critics - these are all around us and in such abundance that we hardly know where to look for the real thing. Or perhaps there is no real thing?