Quotes About Art

Big Red Machine is really a community effort: I guess it involves almost 30 musicians. It does come out of our friendship, but it's really something that is deeply collaborative.

All of the films that I've made are about the country I live in and grew up in... And I think if you're going to put an artist's eye to it, you're going to put a critical eye to it. I've always been interested in the gray area that exists between the black and white, or the red and blue, and that's where complexity lies.

I definitely associate music with color. For example, my first record has a red cover but it is totally green and blue to me.

I'm a disciple of Raymond Chandler, who said in his essays that there's a quality of redemption in anything that can be called art.

I didn't like '12 Years a Slave' because it was playing to the Spielbergian model of redemption.

I'm constantly working on these edges of photography, either to employ so much information or reduce information to the point of collapse.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

When you're doing the work, film and TV are exactly the same. TV is just film in reduced pieces.

Anybody can write a film script 'cuz it has been reduced to a formula.

When I got to the reading all the work, I was reduced to being an actor in an experimental play that I'd already written. And I didn't want to be an actor.

So much of art-making is about reducing things to the essentials, so I don't feel particularly crippled by this. I don't want it to look natural because then I would be making a documentary film.

People said that way back in the early days I was probably one of the first rappers; the reason is that I couldn't sing, so I had to talk! Lou Reed was probably the one who started it all.

But, I'm a big Johnny Cash and a big Lou Reed fan and a Fellini fan.

I learned loudness from working with Lou Reed.

'Pitchfork' said something like, 'Michael Imperioli wrote a book that sounds like Lou Reed fan fiction,' which maybe it is. It's fiction, and I'm a fan. But it's not about me, and it's not a Lou Reed book.

'Some Kind of Monster' is a challenge, and 'Through the Never' is an extension of that. Even the album we made with Lou Reed, it was a challenge.

I was living and working with adult men who were playing a real art form. And I had been playing blues all my life. As soon as I formed my first band, we played Jimmy Reed stuff. So it wasn't like I was a white kid who was learning the blues from B.B. King records.

In Paris, I met a young American person who immediately became the primary inspiration which awakened my vision and the leading influence that had directed my forces. Throughout my career as an artist, I refer to this person by the word 'Woman.'

I'll refer to my music in color, like 'This song needs to be bright red.'

I always refer to Bharatanatyam as the 'now prevalent form of Bharatanatyam' in my interviews. The style changes from generation to generation.

If someone says to me that 'Horizon' is an anti-feminist anthem, I have to tell them, 'No, that's not right.' But I'm not interested in unpicking my music for people. Everybody has different reference points.

Drag went from being referential to being the reference, which is crazy.

I'm not a cinephile. My films don't reference films. I'm more interested in rhythm and feeling.

It's not like since I make comics I only read comics and since I make movies I will only go out and watch movies. Any kind of artistic expression interests me; it goes from literature to music to sculpture, painting; whatever is extremely inspiring for me becomes a reference also for me.