Quotes About Art

Even today, I'm not sure why I make films or what makes me want films. I think it's other people's films. Whenever I see a really great film, I think, 'I want to make a film like that.' And then I never do.

Whenever I've seen shows or films set here, they just don't feel like the real Nashville to me.

Whenever you finish an artwork and the viewer comes and views it, at that moment you've given up control.

Whenever a critic mentions the salary of an actor, I'm thinking, He's not talking about the movie.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

Falling in love is awesome, but I'm never drawn to happy songs per se, so whenever you sit down to write a heartbreak song and you're happily in love, it's like, 'OK, now I have to go back to a sad place to get something good.'

A museum is a place where one should lose one's head.

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

Donald Trump is a great friend, and he has four or five Picassos on his plane. And that's where I would look at them.

I'm mortified to be on the stage, but then again, it's the only place where I'm happy.

There is a gap between the heart and brain - that is where the soundbox lies. Some sing from their heart; others use their brain.

In science, if you don't do it, somebody else will. Whereas in art, if Beethoven didn't compose the 'Ninth Symphony,' no one else before or after is going to compose the 'Ninth Symphony' that he composed; no one else is going to paint 'Starry Night' by van Gogh.

I realized that one of the differences between news photography and dance photography was that the former has to tell a specific story, whereas all a dance photograph had to be was visually interesting.

Ragtime has about the same amount of respect as comics. And in a way they're similar art forms. Ragtime is highly compositional, and the emotion in the music is built in, whereas in jazz a lot of that emotion comes from the way it's performed.

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

The one thing about program television that's absolutely incompatible with any concept of art is that all decisions have to be made by program directors, whereas art is autonomous. It may be dependent, but it knows no superiors.

Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization.

The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it - language, art, science - seemed to have evolved only once. The eye, by contrast, independently evolved 40 times. So, if you were to 'replay' evolution, the eye would almost certainly appear again, whereas the big brain probably wouldn't.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

Film is really the one art form that can effectively use silence. Music and theater can play with silence, but they can't sustain silence without losing energy, whereas film can go into a silent mode and stay there for minutes at a time.

The art market was very different before the mid-1980s: then, art was all about passion, whereas now it's become a commodity.

Will you tell me, 'Oh, painting is a special art, whereas anyone can write prose passably well'? Can he, indeed? ... Can you, sir? Nay, believe me, you are either an archangel or a very bourgeois gentleman indeed if you admit to having spoken English prose all your life without knowing it.

Theatre is more metaphorical where you have to be louder and larger than life, whereas film is more subtle and more real.

There will be some tracks on the next album which that will consist of mostly noise and feedback, whereas others may just have guitar parts and samples.