Quotes About Art

Tacked above my desk are photos of artists I admire - Hopper, Sargent, Twain - and postcards from beloved bookstores where I've spent all my time and money - Tattered Cover, Elliot Bay, Harvard Bookstore.

Writing for myself and writing for another artist are two very different experiences. When I handle both the story and the art, I have full control. I can endlessly tweak every word and every line.

At some point, I'm just of the mind that no art is perfect, and it shouldn't be perfect. I think it's beautiful in its imperfection. You could tweak something forever, but you have to let it go and trust it.

I think comedians should focus on what makes them happy, what art form fulfills them the most. Don't be calculated about it and say, 'Okay, I'm gonna tweet, and I'm gonna podcast, and I'm gonna do standup, and one of those things is going to lead me to my own TV show.' I don't think that should be the goal.

A play is not a tweet. It can't be compressed and embedded, and it definitely can't be delivered apologetically.

Twelve to 15 years of acting school, and I am being a bird.

I didn't have any real art training, but when I was about twelve nad thirteen, another boy and I went to a sign painter's house every Friday night and took lessons.

There's a great charm in theatre; I enjoyed doing it for twelve years and did lots of plays. At this chapter of my life, I am a cinema actor, and I would like to continue to be so, and at some point I would return to the theatre.

I don't read reviews, and it's not because I don't think I can learn something, I'm sure I could learn a lot. I just that I feel very passionately about the work and especially when you're doing theater, you really only need one director and when you read reviews, you feel like you have twelve, because you respond to them, naturally.

Okay, so, when I was a kid, definitely the drawings and the illustration. Then I stopped in sixth grade or so. And then I started again when I was in my twenties. I really didn't progress since then, so the way I draw is the way I drew in sixth grade.

In your twenties, if you have any amount of complexity in your childhood, or any trauma that you haven't dealt with, it comes out. That's why you have a lot of artists that don't make it through.

I spent all of my twenties doing theater in a little 50-seat theater with my friends.

That piece has been choreographed so badly so many times. I'm loathe to do it but I may eventually because it is one of the seminal art works of the twentieth century.

Music has become something different from the past, when it was one hundred per cent live. Throughout the twentieth century, it was recorded, and the medium adjusted.

It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art, in the mid-eighties, I almost always dismissed it as mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.

With twenty six letters, you can create anything you like - any person, any world, any place, any emotion. And they are so potent, so powerful, and at the same time, they're marks on the page, and that's all. There's nothing else to them.

Usually, I'll drop twenty to forty per cent of the dialogue - you can do so much with gesture. I'm still waiting to do a silent film.

The first paid show was in Los Angeles at an art opening and I was paid maybe, I don't know, twenty five bucks?

I take inspiration from my life but only twenty per cent is real the rest is all made up.

It is of no consequence whether a man of genius have learned either art or science before twenty-five: all that is necessary, or even desirable, is that his powers should be unfolded, his emulation roused, and his habits conducted into a right channel.

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.

From the age of eighteen to twenty-one, I worked any job I could get my hands on. One of these jobs was selling fake paintings door-to-door.

It's very important to understand that we never do the same thing twice; each of our projects is unique. We'll never do another 'Gates.' Each project is a unique image. We do not know in advance how the work will look. I do preparatory drawings, but they are only projections of our vision.

The radio stations will happily recycle a badly worded statement by a politician all day but will steer clear of broadcasting more than once or twice a poem by Tomas Transtromer or Rita Dove.