Quotes About Art

You make a movie that is about what you want it to be about and let people have their reaction to it.

I come from the theatre, my bones are in the theatre; it's as natural as breathing to want to be in the theatre

I don't try and be dark, but there are obviously darker emotions that I want to capture sometimes.

Rap and dance is pretty much what I want to be known for.

In my pictures, you never know, that's the mystery. It's just a suggestion and you leave it to the audience to put what they want on it. It's fashion in disguise.

I paint what cannot be photographed, something from the imagination... I photograph the things I don't want to paint, things that are already in existence.

I haven't a great Jazz band and I don't want one.

I wanted to make people think of a totally different way of living from that which we, educated people, live. I would absolutely not want anyone to find it beautiful or good without a thought.

I'm interested in producing truncated shapes in proportion to the frame and composition, shapes that are preferably luminous. I'm not interested in the full-figure. I want to abstract forms.

it must have been hard making a silent movie about a girl who hears voices.)

She was looking at me as if I was a painting too, to be examined for symbols and meaning, and she couldn't decide in the end if I really was just a mass of pointless daubs

Do not follow others," Corot exhorted. "He who follows is always behind. You must interpret Nature with entire simplicity and according to your personal sentiment, altogether detaching yourself from what you know of the old masters or of contemporaries. Only in this way will you do work of real feeling.

Edmund Morris. Beethoven: The Universal Composer. HarperCollins: New York, 2005

Live only in your art," he wrote in his diary, "for you are so limited by your senses. This is nevertheless the only existence for you.

Kay R. Jamison. Touched with Fire. Free Press: New York, 1996

The skill, the art of literacy is a gift. To read is to watch in your mind as a single word explodes into a confetti of images. Truly, of all the gifts given to man, reading is most sacred, For from words come dreams and from dreams come great tomorrows.

Rock was different from rock and roll. Rock was virtuosic and adult, as opposed to popsy and teenaged. Rock and roll was apolitical and fun, while rock was "heavy" and often political, creating vistas of psychic energy that carried beyond the music itself and into radical politics and art.

One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.

A work of art gives testimony to what it is to be a human being. It bears witness, it extracts meaning. A work of art is also the clearest nonphysical way that emotions is communicated from one human being to another. The emotion isn't referred to; it is re-created. The emotion shows us that our most private feelings are in fact shared feelings. And this offer us some relief from our existential isolation. (p: 10)

I don't watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.

Just because everybody uses language, that doesn't mean that they can write even tolerable prose.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

I have often heard people who might sit with him on the lawn, ask him to translate some of it. But he always refused. One couldn't translate it, he said. It lost so much in the translation that it was better not to try. It was far wiser not to attempt it. If you undertook to translate it, there was something gone, something missing immediately.