Hans Zimmer Quotes

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

As a songwriter, that's really what you hope for - to make that connection with your audience.

Artists should never look at pictures, but should stutter in a language of their own.

The businessman says 'If I don't do it first, somebody else will.' The artist says 'If I don't do it first, nobody else will.'

There's only so many things to sing about, so what's going to make a song appeal to you more than someone else's is just a unique way of saying the same thing.

For me, what is most important is the element of surprise. If I can surprise you with every film of mine, that is exactly what I am trying to do.

I make music to generate atmospheres, not to complement already existing ones.

My mother always told me, even if a song has been done a thousand times, you can still bring something of your own to it. I'd like to think I did that.

To me, using music is creating a shorthand with an audience. And I love music so much.

I was doing an interview with a curator, and he asked me to sum up art in one word. Before he even finished asking the question, I said, 'Impurity.' Because that's it.

Frank Ocean would be incredible; I'd love to be a sponge and absorb everything he says. Every song he puts out, I'm like, 'Why didn't I think of this?'

There's this common sense idea that in order to appeal to the biggest number of people, you have to write something very general, but my experience is the more specific you make something, the more people respond to it, in a very odd way.

Not every work of art connects with the audience.

It couldn't interest me less, the idea of putting a living room on stage. I just think, what's the point of walking into a theater to see a living room? A sofa in a forest? Now you're talking.

It's very important to me that every person takes away their own meaning from a song, and it's why I don't always love spelling out what a song is about for somebody.

Cinema is a director's medium; it's his story and his vision. If it's a good story, people will connect to it.

With Quentin Tarantino, he makes movies imagining himself as the audience. To be specific and true to what he wants resonates to people who like his movies.

Artists are always looking for new things and fresh ground and fresh air. If it feels new to me, there's a chance it'll feel new to the audience and we'll have found something.

There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of saying a thing becomes a part of what is said, every work of art is unique and requires fresh attention.

All great art ... creates in the beholder not self-satisfacti on but wonder and awe. Its great liberation is to lift us out of ourselves.

As an aspiring artist, you should strive for originality of vision. Have something to say and a fresh way of saying it. No story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it’s not the work of the imagination.

Rhianna don't want you to give her what you think that she wants. She needs you to give her something that's fresh. So you have to bend your voice and bend your personality and bend the music to make sure it sounds like it's new to everybody.

All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object.

An artist in my view is always afraid of extremists; he is always afraid of those who claim to have found the ultimate solution to any question.

The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.