Quotes About Art

I didn't start doing graffiti until two years after I got to New York. Jean Michel Basquiat was one of my main inspirations for doing graffiti. For a year I didn't know who Jean Michel was, but I knew his work.

And I was very, very much influenced by the films of Jean Cocteau and by Sartre and everything that came out of France because it was closer than America or England.

Anyway, you know, when Richard Meltzer said rock and roll died in '68, what he means is Jefferson Airplane were no longer his buddies, that's what he really means. He means it in a political way: that was when the artists and the audience found themselves on different levels.

I don't think we have to be jerks to make good art either, but somehow we as a society have romanticised that idea.

Personally, I think Jesus would like better bands.

I was lucky enough to be launched into the marketplace with the blessing of a series like 'Jewel.'

I have a lot of lion jewellery and lion art. I also love crystals.

I honestly don't need much money. People love to buy me drinks. Hostesses love to feed me. Famous artists lavish me with expensive artworks, and heiresses do the same with jewels that I promptly lose.

It is as difficult to define or classify Islamic cinema as it would be a Christian, Jewish or Buddhist one.

Whether it is Jimmy Slyde or Lon Chaney or Gregory Hines, their dance shows what they experienced, what they had to go through.

In 1940 I came across a record by Jimmy Yancey. I can't say how important that record is. From then on, all I wanted to do was play the blues.

My dad used to put me in front of the TV screen and made me watch old Jimmy Durante and Dean Martin movies. I just always loved entertainment.

Voyeurism is a director's job description. It's an artist's, too.

I think what I do is borderline art. Most people who do borderline art have to have other jobs, so I'm very grateful.

I like Dali and Magritte. I also like the Scottish artist John Byrne, another surrealist.

An editor does not just join shots. He creates emotions out of the shots.

Rather than say art is art and life is life, I like to say that they're joined and inextricable.

I joined the National School of Drama in the 1980s and for anyone who joins the NSD, they eat, sleep and breathe theatre for three years.

Over the years, I have perfected the art of dancing and photographing at the same time: it's a great double act. If you're dancing, you are joining in. If you stand there rigid, you are not in the flow of things.

After joining theatre, I started thinking that acting in films was not half as challenging as theatre.

Theatre has always been my passion. It never happened to me that theatre took a back seat in my life. I have never stopped doing it even after joining the film industry, and I intend to perform it lifelong.

I thought conceptual art was a joke.

Directing a movie is serious, it's not a joke.

I was saying as a joke the other day that I love film editing, I know how to cut a picture, I think I know how to shoot it, but I don't know how to light it. And I realize it's because I didn't grow up with light. I grew up in tenements.