It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!
You have to let the viewers come away with their own conclusions. If you dictate what they should think, you've lost it.
Growing up I wasn’t sure I was female. As I grew further I wanted to be a lesbian but I wasn’t sure I would meet even the most basic membership criteria (though eventually I created a ‘femme dyke’ persona that worked well for over fifteen years). It wasn’t until my early twenties that I was sure of at least one thing: I was an artist. Quite an accomplishment for anyone assigned female at birth in a culture that calls only male artists ‘great’.
Any artist is an instrument-and that's exactly why you can't do it all the time. You can only do it when it's happening, when it's coming through. No matter how much you may want to do it, if it's not happening then it's simply not happening.
The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.
The artist should strive to express his thought and not the surface of it.
There are clear differences between child and adult artistic activity. While the child may be aware that he is doing things differently from others, he does not fully appreciate the rules and conventions of symbolic realms; his adventurousness holds little significance. In contrast, the adult artist is fully cognizant of the norms embraced by others; his willingness, his compulsion, to reject convention is purchased, at the very least, with full knowledge of what he is doing and often at considerable psychic cost to himself.
An artist must struggle to accept the shape of this universe - and achieve some important successes.
Because I was a dancer when I was a kid, I have so much empathy for these young girls who are so drawn to something lovely in music and in movement, and yet they encounter a world full of judgment and criticism of 11-year-old artists and bodies.
There have been, in recent years, many Asian American pioneers in the public eye who've defied the condescendingly complimentary 'model minority' stereotype: actors like Lucy Liu, artists like Maya Lin, moguls like Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. They are known, often admired.
We grow hostile to many an artist or writer, not because we finally come to see he has deceived us, but because he thought no subtler means were required to ensnare us.
I only know this - that you can’t give advice to an artist.
I don't think people are born artists; I think it comes from a mixture of your surroundings, the people you meet, and luck.
People say it's really the press who create those soundbites about fashion. That's what sells magazines and clothes.
Artists don't often know much about writing. . . but they don't bray so much about writing as writers do about art.
There is a crucial distinction to be made between innovation and originality. The second, unlike the first, can never break with what preceded it: to be original, an artist must also belong to the tradition from which he departs. To put it another way, he must violate the expectations of his audience, but he must also, in countless ways, uphold and endorse them.
The artist's job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn't damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined.
It's a heavy weight, the camera. Now we have modern and lightweight, small plastic cameras, but in the '70s they were heavy metal.
The great conductor is always a despot by temperament and intractable in his ways. . . . The artist is obliged to keep his laughter and tears to himself. If they want to emerge, in spite of himself, then he must hide them or unleash them in someone else.
I don't know of any artist who started off in the 50's who's making it now with new material.