Virtually every subject is most effectively learned directly from the greatest thinkers, historians, artists, philosophers, scientists, prophets and their original works. Great works inspire greatness. Mediocre or poor works inspire mediocre or poor learning. The great accomplishments of humanity are the key to quality education.
As an artist, I didn't think I was gonna get an Oscar. I've never said this, but I've never looked at it like, "We're gonna win Best Supporting Actor."
No one has been able to define or synthesize that precarious, splendid, and perhaps untidy instant when the creative process begins. This is what the uniqueness of the artist is all about. The transcendent right of the artist is the right to create even though he may not always know what he is doing.
I really want to be associated with great projects and character driven projects and films. I have to feed my soul, and keep feeling like an artist and keep being challenged.
I don't know where genre really comes from. I grew up with parents who were artists, and I was always interested in what music they were listening to and open to all kinds of genres. So it's nice to see that whole families come to my concerts. I like having an element in my music that is inclusive rather than exclusive, without being pop for the sake of it. It's not important to me how many people listen to it - it's more wonderful that it brings people who wouldn't usually meet into the same room.
I feel like my strong side is not being technically perfect at the piano, but at curating my own work. It's not painful for me. I don't feel sad when I have to leave things out, put them in the safe, and not have them in public. I realize many artists feel sad about this process, but for me that's the most exciting part: By losing the weaker moments you make the strong moments stronger.
Whatever you do as an artist, people have to have an experience. It's not about the details or the wrong note or what tuning the piano is. It doesn't matter. It all doesn't matter. It only matters what people think when they leave the room and what their impression was.
I do not understand why any poet or writer would run for office; that's a different sense of who you are. I'm just a poet. I am as truthful as I can be. That makes me an artist. I heed the people; I do not lead the people.
Sad to hear that George Michael has died.He was an exceptional artist and a strong supporter of LGBT and workers' rights.
As an artist, comfort can be your worst enemy.
Sometimes as an artist when things come easy to you, you look for other avenues that are more challenging to you and you try to walk those lanes.
I'd like to someday see myself married to my true love and starting a big family, and at the same time still having an artistic job.
If I had known my own limitations, I never would have taken the risk, and the risk led to one my greatest artistic and personal experiences.
It isn't illegal to buy an artist's work for peanuts and sell it again at any price one can get. But it is an outrage!
It was this feeling for a lot of my characters, who are dissidents or banned artists and writers, that they had had to fight living under so much surveillance, and then suddenly they come to America and they're like, I'm not being surveilled - I'm not even being noticed at all.
I stopped drinking and realised New York still has a lot of charm, but it has become so bourgeois and affluent - and I can't really complain because I'm sort of bourgeois and affluent myself, but I like living in a place where artists and musicians and writers can actually pay the rent.
I don't know many artists who are happy with themselves all of the time.
When I first started out in the music industry and went to Elektra Records, I didn't go to be an artist, I went to get a record label started. And they said in order to have a label deal, I had to be an artist - so that's what I did.
Just because you're an artist doesn't give you an excuse to be an asshole.
Every artist who drew Batman after creator Bob Kane was a better artist than Kane [...].
It's tragic that extremists co-opt the notion of God, and that hipsters and artists reject spirituality out of hand. I don't have a fixed idea of God. But I feel that it's us - the messed-up, the half-crazy, the burning, the questing - that need God, a lot more than the goody-two-shoes do.
Artists now decline to go to bed with beauty, fearing they'll wake up with kitsch.
There's the obvious shift in the tech industry. I'm not really politicized about the whole thing, but it's definitely clear that rent is harder and it's harder for musicians or artists or someone not making a ton of money to live comfortably.
I'm not creating an enigma or leaving mystery, I'm just respecting myself enough as an artist to give myself room to grow and not to be devoured all in one go.
I have found, and most artists are probably this way, that [when] you're working on some kind of idea, the idea makes demands.
