Quotes About Art

I don't make political work. I don't make work that criticises the state. I make as human work as I can.

We've never been as active politically as we have been as artists. But politics always brush up against the arts, oh, about every four years in this country.

There is no music that can't be used politically, but the motives behind the creation of that music can be non-political.

As I say, I as an abstract artist was active politically.

I feel very much ideologically, politically if you like, and emotionally part of the European cinema.

I am a politically motivated person, and that will come through in the music.

By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation: those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan... In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential.

I'm not a politician; I'm lucky to be a filmmaker and to be able to express myself through the films I make.

I'm a filmmaker. I'm not a politician.

A politician's speech can't do what a movie or a cultural event like a song or piece of music can.

Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.

Every artistic expression is either influenced by or adds something to politics.

Art is inherently political. Even trying to make a film that has nothing to do with politics is, in and of itself, a political act.

If you want to know about my politics, the only way to do that is to look at my work.

There is a lot of musical pollution in the film industry.

I don't want to make pompous, serious films; I like films that have a kind of vivacity about them.

Well, I don't think anyone now would say that they're painting the state of the culture of America. I think that's too grand and pompous a thing for anybody to claim.

That's another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, 'Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?' And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people.

Opera can be exceptionally moving but can also be pompous.

It was like putting your foot into a pond and knowing that I wanted to dive into this. It wasn't even just acting. It was this medium, film. I had to explore it.

To make independent films, you can't think about them too much, ponder on them too much, get overwhelmed by the enormity of it.

Illustration is commercial. It's work that we produce, and I think what you can do is you can draw from the pool of art, but most of it comes from a pool of knowledge.

I grew up dancing and singing, and I pool together my life experience and relationships and put it into work.

I didn't want to make cinema so a person forgets himself and has a lot of fun. 'I forget myself, I am a little poor consumer.' I wanted to make a picture where someone who sees it say, 'This is me! This is me!'