Wendell Pierce Quotes

Art and music is part of what it means to be a human being. And if you're neglecting that, you're basically ignoring a huge side of the brain and a huge side of what it means to be human.

What art and books do at their best is investigate why we are the way we are.

Music is critical in our lives and culture. It's the inspiration that drives us. It's also the window to our souls. It's a reflection as to who we are, what we stand for and where we're going.

Acting, for me, is not an end in itself. It's more a means to asking the questions I'm obsessed with about life.

You want to make entertainment sometimes, and sometimes you want to make art, because I think the way we understand ourselves as human beings is through art, and the way we process emotions - I know I do - is through recognizing experiences on screen or in novels or in paintings.

The purpose of art is to accumulate the human within the human being.

Art is what defines us, what makes us human.

I like movies that instill passion in the viewer. I like movies that can teach us about who we are as people.

The individual - man as a man, man as a brain, if you like - interests me more than what he makes because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

Art gives people a reason to be alive.

It seems essential to try to find some meaning to life and I guess Jungian philosophy is the one that's helped me understand myself and the world more than anything else.

Many artists use their own lives as a kind of case study to examine what it's like to be human.

Art is about profundity. It's about connecting to everything that it means to be alive, but you have to act.

If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I'd say the question 'How then must we live?' is at the heart of it, for me.

Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.

Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Art is to me the glorification of the human spirit, and as such it is the cultural documentation of the time in which it is produced.

Probably all the books I've ever written have been efforts to define the boundaries of humanity.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

When I first became interested in photography, I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don't give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself.

Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

There's a reason that all societies and cultures and small bands of humans engage in myth-making. Fundamentally, it is to help us understand ourselves.

I'm always looking for something that tells me a little bit about what it means to be human. That's how I measure the success of any artistic endeavor.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.