The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time.
The art is what can't be put on a timeline. You can't say, 'Well, I'm going to make a record in May because that's when the producer has a window.' So just recording and getting things out is paramount for me.
Art teaches you the philosophy of life, and if you can't learn it from art, you can't learn it at all. It shows you that there is no perfection. There is light, and there is shadow. Everything is in half tint.
If there isn't at least the threat of violence in art, it tends to be kind of tiresome.
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
When I was a kid, toe dancing and toe shoes had a meaning in our culture as a serious kind of art.
Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.
In Britten or Berg, there's a tension between the sweet and the sour, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the tonal and the atonal, the happy and the sad. That, to me, is what all western art is about - that tension. It's why we want to say anything at all.
Allan had come down wanting to do some sort of crucial music and I'd been involved in so-called Art Music and wanted to explore other areas - we were approaching it in some quite tongue-in-cheek ways and we had a lot of fun - we spent more time laughing than playing music.
I'm interested in art for all. I don't want it to be only the sons and daughters of Tory MPs who get to see my plays.
I have the most openness about my art... It's total freedom and willingness to work. I'm willing really to walk on the edge, and if I haven't achieved it, that's where I want to go. But in my life - maybe because my life has been so traumatic, so absurd - there hasn't been one normal, happy thing.
To write is a relief from life's problems. It is a way in which you revenge yourself. In art, the writer achieves utopia. But any attempt to achieve social utopia is bound to catastrophe. If you want a society of saints, the result is hell, repression, totalitarianism, and persecution.
If age someday grounds my feet and wilts my port de bras, what vestige of the old life will be left? The signs that I was a dancer will gradually fade like stripes on a beach towel. Even my knowledge of the art form, reaped in sweat over decades, could be lost over time.
The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.
There are a lot of questions about whether architecture is art. The people who ask that think pretty tract houses are architecture. But that doesn't hold up.
I don't believe that directors need to essentially manipulate actors into doing things. You can suffer for your art, and you can make your own self suffer for your art. You don't need anyone else to do it for you. I work best when there's a safety trampoline of kindness.
Music happens to be an art form that transcends language.
Translation is the art of failure.
I'm involved with Kid One Transport and Studio by the Tracks in Alabama. Kid One literally transports kids to better health by giving them transportation they may need to get medical care. Studio by the Tracks is an art outlet for mentally challenged children.
I don't really discriminate with my art. To me, it's my art, and it's to be expressed through whichever medium is there, whether it's treading the boards in the theater, on the small-screen TV, or on the large screen. I love theater, and it's definitely something I would love to do.
