Quotes About Art

People don't like contemporary art, but all art starts life as contemporary - I can't really see a difference.

An icon painter starts not with Jesus Christ but by finding earth and rubbing. Now what is earth, what are you rubbing in directing?

When the business starts shaping the art, or the delivery of the art, then it's not right.

Everything I make starts very personally.

A chair, it's like a sculpture. It starts as a thought and then becomes an idea, something I might think about for years. When the time is right, I express it on paper, usually as a simple line in space. Finally, it takes shape.

The hair and makeup is very important in a fashion picture. When I create a look for a girl, it starts with the makeup. Sometimes it takes an entire day to find the look.

I read a blog about this young filmmaker in the Philippines who made a short film, and one of the characters in the film reads my novel and then starts discussing the novel with someone. The idea that my book can inspire another artist and be part of that other artist's work... that's the reason I write.

Every film starts with two or three images. Then I try to edit these images.

Filmmaking is finding a piece of granite and you start to chip away and then you have the shape of a head, the shape of the arm, you can see the shape of the face and the face starts to gather character. You have to find it.

It's my belief that cooking is a craft. I think that you can push it into the realm of art, but it starts with craft. It starts with an understanding of materials. It starts with an understanding of where foods are grown.

That's when I feel really excited about a painting. When it starts to feel real, when it feels like it has a personality.

Some people lose sense of what their music was when their life starts to get better.

For me, making music just starts with a simple melody, and lyrics will come sometime after that.

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.

Artists complain about the art world until it starts rubbing their back, then they have their love affair with it.

My parents did not discourage me but could not understand how I could make a living by art. Their idea of an artist was a person who was condemned to starvation.

An artist will starve unless he is near big centers of population. We should create many of these cultural centers right in our own slums.

Somehow, the French got this idea of the starving artist. Very romantic, except it's not so romantic for the starving artist.

I'm dying to do a Sam Shepard play. 'Curse of the Starving Class,' 'Buried Child,' 'True West,' 'Cowboy Mouth,' 'Fool for Love' - I'll do any of them.

Whether you're starving in a garret or living in a castle like J. K. Rowling, I had this image of the author as a flawless, composed individual, serene in the knowledge they were creating art.

You can't argue that you have to have art, and prove it to anybody. Why should I give $1,000 to art when there are people starving? Of course, that's true. But just because you can't, theoretically, defend the arts, or make a sensible argument for their preservation, doesn't mean they're not important.

That is how America gets her art: Contracting firms get the contract and the honor. Starving artists do the work. The government pays for sculpturing thousands of dollars, of which the sculptor gets a hundred or so.

I want to promote the introduction of art history in primary schools and to convince the general public that, even in a period of economic crisis, arts funding is an absolute necessity at the federal, state, and local levels.

The work of art is brought into the world without there being a need for it. The house satisfies a requirement. The work of art is responsible to none; the house is responsible to everyone. The work of art wants to draw people out of their state of comfort.