Art Quotes - Page 726

Lots of things inspire me. My friends and my family, obviously. I really like to travel, so very inspired by traveling and meeting new people along the way. Also, music and the arts, like film and television. I like to read a lot too; that stuff inspires me.

If you are on Craigslist to get a sofa, and you see one for free. You think there’s something tragically wrong with it - maybe there are bedbugs. But if you see a sofa on there for $2,500, you think ‘oh man, that sofa must be amazing’. It’s the same thing with art - you set your own value.

The greatest work of art about New York? The question seems nebulous. The city's magic and majesty are distilled in the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand.

Art schools are partly the villain here. (Never mind that I teach in them.) This generation of artists is the first to have been so widely credentialed, and its young members so fetishize the work beloved by their teachers that their work ceases to talk about anything else. Instead of enlarging our view of being human, it contains safe rehashing of received ideas about received ideas. This is a melancholy romance with artistic ruins, homesickness for a bygone era. This yearning may be earnest, but it stunts their work, and by turn the broader culture.

Music is the most powerful thing on this earth, and it's hard to be angry when you are listening to music.

We are learning that the earth functions like an invisible organism. We are the various cells of one living being. Those who work to save the earth are its antibodies.

Labour Party members must all be free to criticise and oppose injustice and abuse wherever we find it.

When the fire of your soul ignites the passion within your heart, don't view it as an opportunity for success or failure, view it as an open door for miracles.

As I read the Qur'an and prayed the Islamic prayers, a door to my heart was unsealed and I was immersed in an overwhelming tenderness.

In the beginning I was just a makeup artist and I never really pictured myself doing anything else. But now that I have so many doors open, I kind of want to be that indie rock Paris Hilton - but with actual intelligence - she's just stupid.

We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.

Art sometimes is as simple as nothing, and other times as mysterious as nature or a woman.

Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.

Do it from the heart or not at all.

It's the honest point of view of an artist: You have to please.I'd like viewers to come away from my films unsure whether they've understood them. I want to leave them wondering.

Your first duty is to be humane. Love childhood. Look with friendly eyes on its games, its pleasures, its amiable dispositions. Which of you does not sometimes look back regretfully on the age when laughter was ever on the lips and the heart free of care? Why steal from the little innocents the enjoyment of a time that passes all too quickly?

Art is nature as seen through a temperament.

I hope with all my heart there will be painting in heaven.

When people love each other, they are content with very little. When we have light and joy in our hearts, we don't need material wealth. The most loving communities are often the poorest.

There is nothing stronger than a heart which loves and is freely given.

I want to act because I don't know how to do anything else.

In my art and life, I really strive to reverse the old adage that what you see is what you get. If I can be Coyote and practice my sneak-up, I can engage the viewers from a distance with one image and lure them in for exposure to another layer, which changes the initial view into quite a different reality. After all, that is what ethnic culture is all about - or even an ongoing relationship. What you see on the surface is never the same again one you begin to plumb the depths.

I think one of the both liberating and terrifying prospects from synthetic biology for example is that you are going to have all of these do it yourself biosynthetic labs where people are going to be playing with the software of life. We are going to have a new generation of artists that are going to be playing with genomes the way that Blake and Byron used to play with poetry. And when genomes are the new canvas for the artist, we might be able to radically upgrade the human species and the software of the biology of the human species.

I represent Jesus on this earth and he represents me in heaven.

In the history of art there are periods when bread seems so beautiful that it nearly gets into museums.