Quotes About Art

No writer can really sustain two huge - I hate the word 'franchises.'

I have a growing resume, but it's because I'm very selective. There are a lot of actors in my position that are like me: they have an opportunity to make a lot of money early in their career, and they do that, and after that, there's nothing to sustain that. There's no art or interest in your craft from the people that want to see you.

One of the things you hope you've done as a playwright is create roles that can sustain different interpretations.

Catharsis isn't art. You can't rely on catharsis to get a laugh. Because guess what? People do laugh when something's shocking, but that is, to me, the absolute fakest of laughs. That's not something that sustains a television series, or a movie, or even 45 minutes of a stand-up set at Carolines.

Breughel is an example of an artist - I mean, this is true about artists and painters in general, but he is a specific example of an artist whose work contains more than you think it does at first glance. Whose work rewards, sustains attention and looking.

Cinema sustains life. It captures death in its progress.

The real sustains the same relation to the ideal that a stone does to a statue - or that paint does to a painting. Realism degrades and impoverishes.

Working as a model liberated me from ever having to hold a day job. I transitioned from doing that to working full-time as an artist. If you're 19 and living cheap, being an artist model can sustain you.

I can speak Hindi, but I can't sustain it over a whole movie.

I don't make a particular distinction between 'high art' and 'low art.' Music is there for everybody. It's a river we can all put our cups into and drink it and be sustained by it.

But what does interest me is the notion that if you do a lot of work it means there's a potential for other people to understand that a lot of things are possible with a sustained effort and that the broadening of experiences is possible and I think that's all art can be.

I became a musician because I love music, and that is what has sustained me; it's not because I thought it was a great way to make a living. Music saved my life.

Yes, I would loved to have just sustained myself through my art, but less than one in a billion musicians gets that life. So rather than being like, 'I'm an exception!', like a moron, I thought I'd get a real job.

I think poetry always lives its life, and people come to it and people go away from it, 'people' in the sense of larger numbers of people. It's as though you begin to think that poetry is a resource, and that at certain times people seem to need it or want it or can find sustenance in it, and at other times they can't.

'Swallow Me Whole' is still the creation that's closest to my heart.

To learn flamenco is to swallow your pride.

Mother' is something people can't swallow. It was about me visualising my connection with my mother, my journey through her belly, and it's 60 minutes long - it was never going to be understood by the masses.

I guess because I came to it later in life, I realized, 'Oh, going to a fashion show is like going to the opening of Degas at the Met or going to see Swan Lake.'

'Swan Lake' was my favourite piece of music when I was younger, and I never had a chance to skate to it.

Blood is the leitmotif of 'Black Swan.'

I hated Matthew Bourne's 'Swan Lake' when it first turned up, and then when it was televised, and then when it returned.

I swear if I had to do this over again, I would just do the paintings and never show them.

I find a lot of swearing in films. And I guess that shows my age. But I also feel that where they say those words, they could just as easily have written other words.

It doesn't excite me as a writer to write some swearing or sex scenes, because they don't have any emotional content.