Artist Quotes - Page 138

No wonder the film industry started in the desert in California where, like all desert dwellers, they dream their buildings, rather than design them.

Our engineering departments build freeways which destroy a city or a landscape, in the process.

Builders eventually took advantage of the look of modernism to build cheaply and carelessly.

I plead for conservation of human culture, which is much more fragile than nature herself. We needn't destroy other cultures with the force of our own.

Roman civilization had achieved, within the bounds of its technology, relatively as great a mastery of time and space as we have achieved today.

What constitutes American painting?... things may be in America, but it's what is in the artist that counts. What do we call 'American' outside of painting? Inventiveness, restlessness, speed, change.

Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.

For just as for a flute-player, a sculptor, or an artist, and, in general, for all things that have a function or activity, the good and the well is thought to reside in the function, so would it seem to be for man, if he has a function.

Everyone knows French artist Claude Monet's "Water Lilies," which he painted in his garden. You find the images everywhere from galleries to dorm rooms and dentists' lounges.

I have often heard the statement made by foreign singers, as a demonstrated fact, that the German artists are artists in feeling indeed, and serious in their devotion, but that their singing is crude.

It's not fair to compare one artist to another because they all come with their own sort of elements to the picnic, you know.

It's a heavy weight, the camera. Now we have modern and lightweight, small plastic cameras, but in the '70s they were heavy metal.

When you go to take someone's picture, the first thing they say is, what you want me to do? Everyone is very awkward.

My lens of choice was always the 35 mm. It was more environmental. You can't come in closer with the 35 mm.

We all have our insecurity and that's normal. And you have to learn to accept that about being an artistic person or aspiring to be an artistic person is that fears and insecurity, they don't go away.

All art requires courage.

The artist knows he must be alone to create; the writer, to work out his thoughts; the musician, to compose; the saint, to pray. But women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.

I feel the symbolic world is the nub of a problem for an artist

It would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a great big ring on Liz Taylor's finger.

I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, everything could just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment.'

My idea of a good picture is one that's in focus and of a famous person.

How can you say one style is better than another? You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you've given up something.. I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's is going to happen, that's going to be the whole new scene.

Confrontation is something that I accept as part of the project though not its purpose.

Stones are checked every so often to see if any have split or at worst exploded. An explosion can leave debris in the elements so the firing has to be abandoned.

It's frightening and unnerving to watch a stone melt.