Any artist, in any field, wants to press deeper, to discover further. Image and sound play are among the strongest colors available to poetry's palette. For a long time, I've wanted to invite in more strangeness, more freedom of imagination. Yet music, seeing, and meaning are also cohering disciplines. They can be stretched, and that is part of poetry's helium pleasure. But not to the point of breaking.
There's no artist in this world that doesn't enjoy the dream that if they have bad reviews now, the story of Keats can redeem them, in their fantasy or imagination, in the future. I think Keats' poem 'Endymion' is a really difficult poem, and I'm not surprised that a lot of people pulled it apart in a way.
A few of the artists knew my name, because I have an unusual name, from Rolling Stone.
Sometimes we were really surprised. There were major artists that would come by because they wanted to.
I was a bit scared because I came from the acting world. There was a fear that people would think of me kind of as a joke. But really, people think of me as a country artist who can act. That's my favorite compliment.
An artist may sustain a body of work as an ecosystem, in which every part is used to every advantage, not consuming any part without regenerating it.
I think it was important for me to introduce myself as an artist for the first time because I'm very proud of my past, it's all a part of my story, but this is who I am now. This was a really important thing to have an hour special that lets them in and kind of meet me for the first time, truthfully.
I think Prince should open up a little more to other artists. Just because we love Prince. Especially the old stuff - we love him to death. But if he opened up he would be something to deal with. Imagine Kanye West producing a Prince track? It would be banoodles!
If I'm smart as an artist, I wouldn't be a snob and turn it down, because I'd look at it and go, this is great stuff, but I definitely do want to experiment in other genres, or make films in other genres.
It's like half the campaign of selling a record is trying to convince people that you're an artist. Well, I am an artist. This is what I do.
The artist's role is to do what is honest for them. So if you're in New York and everyone is looking at the floor, you can look up. It's not your role to follow the others. It's your role to go to your centre and then reflect that, not just to be a mirror to what's happening.
It seems absolutely wrong that people should be able to profit in this cynical way from an event that is designed to highlight the need for action on poverty in Africa, and for which so many artists and others are donating their valuable time for nothing [on people selling Live8 concert tickets on eBay]
The New York Times is the worst newspaper in the world and it's extremely vicious to artists.
If the person or artist doesn't touch it, and if the camera stays relatively far away from it, it doesn't really have to be real.
I remind myself that traveling through life as an artist requires one to distill things slowly. To be inquisitive, inventive, and patient - a lot of things get discarded along the way. It's a little like boiling sea water to get at the salt.
As a journalist, I never critiqued anyone. I never review books. I've never felt qualified as a musician to say whether someone is a good musician or a bad musician. What happens with Black writers and Black artists is that if you're critiqued, for example, by a Black historian who wants to get his name on the cover of "The New York Times," and he says something, like, wacky, well, he'll get his name on the cover of "The New York Times" and he might get tenure, and your career suffers.
Never read bad stuff if you're an artist; it will impair your own game.
Nast is an artist of uncommon abilities. His works evince originality of conception, freedom of manner, lofty appreciation of national ideas and action, and a large artistic instinct.
I always assume that nothing that I make is going to be a success, that everything I make is going to be a failure - not a failure but not some huge box- office success. If something is an artistic success, I'll be happy, but I'll maybe be the only person that's happy.
I love a lot of the New York bands, but Patti Smith stands out. I just read 'Just Kids' and it's an inspirational, well-written account of an emerging New York artist in the late seventies.
I am far less interested in serving as a change agent than in functioning as a prose artist, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.
As far as artists and musicians, they don't retire. They might tour less.
I've always said I'm more influenced in what I do by artists, and how they work, how they think, and the freedom they're given to work and think, than I really am by other writers.
I think as an artist or a writer it's OK to want to control your own work.
I was being generous. Gia Coppola wasn't even a filmmaker at that time, but I asked her to do it, because I believed in her as an artist. And because I wanted a woman's take on the material. The book Palo Alto is very male-centric, but Gia carved out a bunch of the female characters, and brought them to the fore in the movie. And the project was richer for it.
