Quotes About Art

The glory that was Greece.

What would life be without art? Science prolongs life. To consist of what-eating, drinking, and sleeping? What is the good of living longer if it is only a matter of satisfying the requirements that sustain life? All this is nothing without the charm of art.

Acting is happy agony.

I know that everyone brings to the work his or her own experiences and background and may interpret the piece like a Rorschach, in their own way.

Caricature: putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.

Doing a scene truthfully is very similar to doing a song truthfully. They're really parallel.

Creating a character and living truthfully through her is a whole different ball game. It's all part of the same person but it's a much newer medium for me.

I'm totally open to it being a movie or a television series or whatever, but truthfully, if no one wants to do it right, I'm also happy for 'Ex Machina' to only ever exist as a comic book.

So long as you do it truthfully, music is not to be judged.

Truthfully, I'm proud of each of my films in a certain way.

The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.

In its primary aspect, a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives.

The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.

Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was the supreme literary form - not just one among many, not a relic of the past, but the way we communicate to one another the subtlest truths about this business of living.

What I hear every day on talk radio is America's lack of education - and I don't mean lack of college degrees. I mean lack of the basic art of democracy, the ability to seek the great truths that can come only by synthesizing the small truths possessed by each of us.

We use metaphors to express our own truths.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

I think it's the responsibility of a designer to try to break rules and barriers.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America, no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa.

I look at the Samurai because they were the artists of their time. What I think struck me when I read Bushido is compassion. 'If there's no one there to help, go out and find someone to help.' That hit me, because I try to lead my life like that.

I always try to make the music that I like and think my fans will like.

The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.

My duty is to try to reach beauty. Cinema is emotion. When you laugh you cry.