Art Quotes - Page 803

In my early 20s, I had this idea that I was going to front a band, like Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin. I didn't just want to be the chick singing ballads about somebody breaking my heart. Everyone in the business said, 'Why don't you do what Olivia Newton-Jonn and Linda Ronstadt are doing?' But I wanted to sing as a powerful female who wasn't afraid to speak her mind or be sexual.

It's hard to be responsible, adult and sensible all the time. How good it is to have a sister whose heart is as young as your own.

When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait.

The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown-a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest.

We now know that Art is not the truth... but rather a way of approaching the truth.

Art sweeps the everyday dust from your soul.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Bach is the supreme genius of music... This man, who knows everything and feels everything, cannot write one note, however unimportant it may appear, which is anything but transcendent. He has reached the heart of every noble thought, and has done it in the most perfect way.

What I am concerned about in this fast-moving world in a time of crises, both in foreign and domestic affairs, is not so much a program as a spirit of approach, not so much a mind as a heart. A program lives today and dies tomorrow. A mind, if it be open, may change with each new day, but the spirit and the heart are as unchanging as the tides.

The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.

Music is the art... which most completely realizes the artistic idea and is the condition to which all the other arts are constantly aspiring.

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

Now that Marilyn Monroe is kosher, Arthur Miller can eat her.

The artist, like the idiot or clown, sits on the edge of the world, and a push may send him over it.

One day, I went to a soba restaurant outside town, and while I was waiting for the zarusoba I opened an old graph magazine. There was a picture of an exhausted, lonely kneeling woman who wore a checked patterned yukata after the tradegy of a large earthquake. With the intensity of my chest ready to burn up, I fell in love with that poor woman. I also felt a horrifying desire for her. Maybe tragedy and desire are back to back to one another.

We can use our art to become political, to become something you want to talk about. We make clothes, but we have the chance to change a generation as well. We have to remember that fashion changed the roles of men and women: When Yves Saint Laurent was putting pants on a woman, he was not only doing that - he was assuming the fact that a woman can wear pants like a man. It's all the codes that I think fashion pushed so much to change the world, and today it's what I'm trying to do in my own way.

If we have youth, beauty, blessed gifts, strength, if we find fame, fortune, favor, fulfillment, it is easy to be nice, to turn a warm heart to the world.

Revolt is the violence of an entire people; rebellion the unruliness of an individual or an uprising by a minority; both are spontaneous and blind. Revolution is both planned and spontaneous, a science and an art.

Poet: gardener of epitaphs.

A vital part of the happiness formula is self-discipline. Whoever conquers himself knows deep happiness that fills the heart with joy.

When I go to farms or little towns, I am always surprised at the discontent I find. And New York, too often, has looked across the sea toward Europe. And all of us who turn our eyes away from what we have are missing life.

The heart of the matter is that some people like to cause injury or death to living things. And many of those who do not are indifferent to those who do.

Success and the art of making music are two different things for me.