Quotes About Art

Most people think a song is a song - three minutes, and you're done. I don't think this way. Songs are my wings. They're what I use to fly. It's very important for me to put everything in the right place.

The ballet world is so competitive, and for no reason. It's not a sport. It's an art. There's no winner.

Unlike sport, music is not about winning or keeping fit or promoting your town or school; it's about celebrating, to a level approaching ecstasy, the deepest human longings.

Yes, I believe that the art of winning is through intimidation, and not necessarily do you have to speak about it.

I don't want to be a Michael Moore-style artist, which is not to disparage Michael Moore. But he seems rather unsuccessful at winning people over who don't already agree with him.

When it comes down to it, it's all about good music and what makes people react. That wins over everything else.

Growing up, everyone around me in El Paso, Texas, was all about watching 'The Wall' and, you know, 'Money' and 'Dark Side of the Moon,' which are fantastic records, of course.

A lot of my work is about text taken to the point of abstraction.

How you carry a story in pictures is different than how you do it in text.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

Sol LeWitt had a huge influence on my work because of his use of repetition and his clarity, setting up a system and letting that system go. That's kind of where the text paintings came from.

Pictures have a lot more power than text. Text is just a bunch of little symbols. You have to actually read it and imagine it, and even that can be censored. With pictures, it's a lot more immediate.

Then one day I thought it would be wonderful to make a whole book, to make my text and my drawings together, and that's how I started doing children's books.

The composition of a single melody is born out of a bit of text, perhaps the first line, but it can also be the entire strophe; it can even be the poem's overall form.

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.

When I'm working, I'm so narrowly focused on sound, language, rhythm, flow, that I rarely feel the emotion of the text. It's only after - long after - I've finished a piece that I can experience in any way its emotional charge.

We haven't lost romance in the digital age, but we may be neglecting it. In doing so, antiquated art forms are taking on new importance. The power of a handwritten letter is greater than ever. It's personal and deliberate and means more than an e-mail or text ever will.

When I'm writing the text for a book like 'Little White Rabbit,' I read it aloud, alone, in my studio, again and again and again - because the rhythm has to be exactly right. After I get my manuscript to the point where I think it is perfect, I begin to think about what I want the art to look like.

My father was a self-employed textile agent, and the shop below his office was an art gallery.

When I directed the 'Ring' cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in New York recently, there were people texting all through the show. But theatre isn't a communication device: it's a communion.

When I talk of primordial innocence, I hear it in Sufi music with the nay flute. I see it in Coptic icons, in most traditional art, particularly art of the American Indian. I find the texts extraordinarily beautiful and very childlike and very simple. I've been particularly interested in American Indian texts.

To me, movies are books. They are texts to be consulted.

I've always been a composer dependent on texts.

I began to see that the short texts I was writing were poster material.