Andre Gide Quotes

That's the motivation of an artist - to seek attention of some kind.

I love the intimacy and the passion and the danger that go into independent filmmaking. Because it comes out of a creative necessity. It comes from people who really want to make a movie and want to make a difference and want to grab an audience by the gullet and show them something different.

I mean, I don't know anything else that I would try to do, but it's a very frustrating thing to do, because you are trying to take what's a fantasy in your head and make it live through the minds of 200 people.

I never called my work an 'art'. It's part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

I would not have so many scripts being driven by demographics. The play's the thing - not the 18-35 year old male age group.

I know they call me a crazy lady, but I'm only interested in making movies and having people see them.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, 'Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not?' But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.

There is a logic of colors, and it is with this alone, and not with the logic of the brain, that the painter should conform.

I think that everyone who does music, and everyone who does art, or everyone who decides at a young age that they're gonna do that, is someone who feels like an outsider. The world is not really set up for that.

Great art stretches the taste, it doesn't follow tastes.

My paintings are only the ashes of my art

I paint what I think, not what I see.

Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.

Painting, like any art, comprises a technique, a workmanlike handling of material, but the accuracy of a tone and the fictitious combination of effects depend entirely on the choice made by the artist.

The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature - art can go no further.

Unchecked, the dominating influences of money and of barren intellectualism would reduce the life of emotions to freezing point. And, unable to grasp the holier benefits of religion, the mysticism of the heart reacts in the art-intoxication. .... In this cold, irreligious and practical age the warmth of this devotion to art has kept alive many higher aspirations of our soul, which otherwise might readily have died, as they did in the middle of the last century.

An artist should have more than two eyes.

Isadore [Duncan], who had an un-American genius for art, for organizing love, maternity, politics and pedagogy on a great personal scale, had also an un-American genius for grandeur.

... the novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.

I'm certain, as we filled down the great staircase, that I appeared the same as ever, a moping twelve years-old, all arms and legs. But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.

As an artist you have to find something that deeply interests you. It's not enough to make art that is about art, to look at Matisse and Picasso and say, how can I paint like them? You have to be obsessed by something that can't come out in any other way, then the other things - the skill and technique - will follow.

I envy musicians their ability to live their art and share it with an audience, in the moment. From a filmmaker's standpoint, that's so rare and pure in a way that I'm sure is way more complicated than it appears.