Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

A proof of really great art is that it is generally true - it seldom falls into the misapprehensions to which minor art is liable.

When I look at great works of art or listen to inspired music, I sense intimate portraits of the specific times in which they were created.

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.

A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.

A great song is one that is around even when I'm not.

If something becomes old-fashioned, it was no good to start with. Think about it. Michelangelo is not old-fashioned.

And I always try to make a clean, honest, product and ideas for people to get into that can transcend time. Like the Dougie.

For me, Fellini was like a watermelon. It is there. A watermelon cannot die.

When I'm dead and gone, people will know that the twenty-first century was started by Alexander McQueen.

Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now.

The point is that the arts are important enough to have influenced the greatest minds and talents we know. Albert Einstein said that if he were not a physicist, he would probably be a musician.

Shakespeare and Rembrandt have in common the faculty of quickening speculation and compelling the minds of men to combat and discussion.

Pop music was supposed to be a flash in the pan, but here we are 50 years later and it means something to us, and it always will do. It's incredibly important.

Elvis is great and so is anybody who lasts like he does.

That, for me, is the only real legacy: the idea that one has left a lingering trace in people's memories. In the end, that's all a director can hope to do.

I never want to make the kind of film whose impact ends when the audience leaves the cinema.

Take Tom Sachs as an artist. His brain is more brilliant than anything, so of course, anything he puts out over a ten-year period is going to continue to be super relevant. But if you look at some artists, they have one good idea, but unless you know where it's coming from, it's not going to be lasting.

'Hairspray' has never been irrelevant, which is, in some ways, heartbreaking.

Shakespeare is a seminal story-teller. I don't think he imagined he was writing classics or that he was writing great poetry. I don't think he dreamt his work would be staged 400 years after he died.

Artists are the gatekeepers of truth. We are civilization’s anchor. We are the compass for humanity’s conscience.

I still hope that more people can create art, even though artistic genres may never be the most popular or money-making genres. But the thing is, I think art is more long-lasting. It stays in people, and it changes them.

The true work of art is the one which the seventh wave of genius throws up the beach where the undertow of time cannot drag it back.

When, about fifteen years ago, I walked into Arshile's studio for the first time, the atmosphere was so beautiful that I got a little dizzy and when I came to, I was bright enough to take the hint immediately. If the bookkeepers think it necessary to make sure of where things and people came from, well then, I came from 36 Union Square. I am glad that it is about impossible to get away from his powerful influence.

If one but tell a thing well, it moves on with undying voice, and over the fruitful earth and across the sea goes the bright gleam of noble deeds ever unquenchable.

Art is never the voice of a country, it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.