John Lasseter Quotes

I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

I think that art is supposed to be ahead of the times.

To paint well, I need to be enraptured by my subjects.

The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement.

You know, for a long time I have been of the opinion that artists don't necessarily know what they're doing. You don't necessarily know what kind of universal concept you're tapping into.

I guess artists are living inspiration. There's something very pure about a person that fantasizes. I like hearing their stories, watching them work. Their take on the world interests me. It's not unified.

In the nineteenth century the more grandiose word inspiration began to replace the word idea in the arts.

You really can't bring about anything new with art.

There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture - that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within.

I've always been involved in the visual aspect of my work, and moreover, it's very important in days where technology allows us to push the boundaries even more than when I started out.

Leger was not only the first artist I ever met but also the first pop artist, and he blew our minds.

Leave to the masters of art trained by a lifetime of devotion the wonderful process of picture-building and picture creation. Go out into the sunlight and be happy with what you see.

So is fighting incompleteness the source of artistic neurosis? I doubt it. At most, this would apply to artists who deal with particular kinds of problems. I don't think we should think of Haydn or Mozart or Dickens or George Eliot in these terms.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

[The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.

Most artists create foundations where they put their own work. Here I'm not putting my own work. I'm just creating the chambers.

When John Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my South End studio at five o'clock on a May morning in 1916, neither of us had any inkling of its great possibilities, nor of the thorny yet successful road it was to take. As so often happens in life, we had stumbled across a vein of gold without knowing it.

Everything's a film idea if this is what you do.I've always been secretly confident that I'd never run out of ideas,because I've never had any. I just live my life, see things theway I do, and I'm just looking for a notion to hang it all on.

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.

If you're going to be an artist, real life is your inspiration.

There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love.

I find that it's a very odd thing to think of competition when you're talking about what I still think of as art. I don't think of competing with actors or filmmakers at all. You do compete, in a way, at the box office, but we're far enough apart when both films are coming out that I'm not concerned with that either.

Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well you have to forget the grammar.

I never thought of being a performer, never thought of being a singer, never thought of being a photographer. It's just the trajectory of my work. I go to the medium that serves the vision.