Quotes About Art

'Do the Right Thing' was like the first film where I really felt comfortable working with actors.

After 'Rock On!,' when I started acting, and I sang in the film, people asked me, 'What was the need to sing in your film?' and things like that. I really don't have an answer for it. In terms of what made me do it? It just felt like the right thing to do.

What you learn when you direct a film, even more so than as a producer, it's a marriage. It's like a relationship with that film so you've got to make sure that it's really something that you want to live with for three years or however long it is. So I haven't found the right thing to marry yet.

'Do the Right Thing' has been a big influence on me. I saw it when it first came out in 1989. I was about 18, and it blew me away on many levels - I had never seen anything like it before.

Music is my soul and I can easily say, it is the secret of my youth.

I wouldn't be surprised if some day, they put the Simpsons in the Smithsonian. It's become part of our culture, those characters.

Anybody in animation today would be lying if they said they weren't somehow influenced by 'The Simpsons' to a certain degree. Except for the shows that go out of their way to look as far from 'The Simpsons' as possible.

Are the Simpsons cool? They are, and that is crude 2D animation.

I still think, most of the time, when people called shows like 'The Sopranos' or 'Deadwood' 'art' that they were correct.

As a writer, I've always been the sum total of my influences, and those are all over the spectrum: Rachmaninov, the Who, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Lesley Gore, Burt Bacharach and Leonard Bernstein, the Rolling Stones and the Small Faces.

The Who is one of my favorite bands of all time. 'The Who Sell Out' is one of the greatest art-project albums of all time.

Theater has an incredible capacity to move people to social change, to address issues, to inspire social revolution.

In theater, blood is ketchup; in performance, everything's real.

Actors are agents of change. A film, a piece of theater, a piece of music, or a book can make a difference. It can change the world.

From day one, musical theater was my bread and butter.

My theater has always been a political battle on the stage.

I always say film is art, theater is life and television is furniture.

Well, first of all I'll say that I come alive best in theater.

I was raised around a lot of artists, musicians, photographers, painters and people that were in theater. Just having the art-communal hippie experience as a child, there wasn't a clear line that was drawn. We celebrated creative experience and creative expression. We didn't try and curtail it and stunt any of that kind of growth.

When movies first came out, maybe they were in black and white and there wasn't any sound and people were saying the theater is still the place to be. But now movies and theater have found their own place in the world. They are each legitimate art forms.

I grew up doing musical theater.

We went to see all the shows. American musical theater and jazz were very big.

I just realized at some point that I was hopelessly in love with the theater. I fought it for a long time because I thought theater was for, you know, insufferable actors.

I absolutely want to have a career where you make'em laugh and make'em cry. It's all theater.