Quotes About Art

Music is very abstract. When we talk about music, we're not discussing the music itself but rather how we react to it.

It's difficult to explain exactly how I react to music, but if it makes me feel anything at all, then I'll have some kind of emotional relationship to it. That's what defines good music to me - if it makes me truly feel something.

Art has the power to influence and to make you react to something that you normally wouldn't concern, worry, or even think about or wouldn't want to talk about.

I always feel like you never know: sometimes you can put out work that you feel is really strong, and other times, you can put out work you think is less strong, and people react to it, so it's kinda like in the eye of the beholder!

Drawing will never go out of date because, you know, you've still got to have the imaginative thought. You've got to react to the world in the present and do a drawing.

I respond to creativity well when I'm outside and reacting to experiences, not inside a studio.

Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.

Creativity is about a reaction.

Why are all the artists so dead-set on distorting? It seems to be a reaction against photography, but I'm not sure.

There is a broad range of reaction to the work, as there is a broad range of work I make.

I prefer to make a film that people have a really intense reaction to than have a film that people feel ambivalent about.

There are certain artworks that I respond to, artists that I respond to. It's an intellectual reaction but it's also a biological reaction. And the excitement that the work can generate - how it makes you feel about not only your intellectual possibilities but your physical possibilities in this world. How it feels to be alive!

People don't step outside themselves and make the film they want to make, because they're afraid of the reaction. But once you get that reaction and have lived through it, there's nothing they can do to get you down.

Theatre is real-time - you get that real-time audience reaction, which is fantastic. And with art pieces, people don't ever have to explain themselves. You can do something and really follow a research. With architecture, you have to be much more public. You have to build consensus. You have to work within the law. There are more complexities.

Poets are supposed to be underappreciated, don't you know? There is always a strange reaction to those who become successful in their own lifetime, and so I always felt lucky that I made the living I did out of it.

That's the extraordinary thing about opera: it has the power to elicit a physical reaction. I don't know if I'd have been any good or not, but I do know that I was never committed enough to find out.

I quite like Jackson Pollock, and have a real gut reaction to it, so it does whatever it does to me.

Music can inspire immediate emotional reactions, even if the only person who hears it is the person creating it.

There are so many reactions to art that make sense to me - but 'ick' means something.

Music doesn't have to have lyrics; it doesn't have to be a particular type of music - it has the ability to bring out really strong and hopefully good emotional reactions in people.

The way I put together images is a reactive art.

Poetry. I read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Hirschfield. I like to read Billy Collins out loud.

I like to read books. I like to listen to music.

With my pictures, what I hope is that it encourages the reader to imagine more pictures of his own.