Jeff Koons Quotes

I've always had a certain fascination. It's basically paint what you know, and this is what I grew up with.

I wish to share and pass down some of my generation's traits, and encourage young people to create their own art, music, and literature.

I'm probably much more influenced by film-makers and painters than I am by other songwriters or poets.

I love history. I love art. I like to mix it all together, but in the end it somehow has to all make sense.

All these actors who died before I was born, all the theaters and the artistic movements - all that stuff fills you up and makes you feel like you're the inheritor of all this information and of all its passion.

You can go down the list of great artists and kind of understand that they are products of their environment. Whether it's U2 or Henry Rollins or myself or Johnny Lydon, they're gonna be products of their environment.

The Met is such a powerful place for me because it's a natural connection between the ancient world and the modern world. And when you're dealing with ancient mythology, trying to put a modern spin on it, you really can't do much better than to call on the Met.

A little part of my life is built around ancient art.

To have a National Endowment for the Arts is to sanction creativity, to provide space to support the poetic, and to give meaning to struggle, hope and life. The artist interprets and represents for us perspectives so that we can question, focus and reexamine our worlds, to imagine the possible and the impossible. The culture and arts of America are our greatest asset.

Whatever you are making, whether it's a song, an album, a painting, a film, you're connecting with a tradition, and I do feel connected to New York music.

I believe in the relation between photography and music; And thats my inspiration.

I think what inspires me is in a constant state of flux...it's easier to stick to photographers and perhaps cinematographers, though the great medieval, Mannerist, and Baroque painters of Italian, Spanish, Flemish, and German origin are a constant source of inspiration, along with select modernists like Dali.

Anyone in the arts has had an experience of seeing someone who they related to doing something and thinking, 'I could do that.' If you have one generation where you force its hand a bit, then the next one fills in the gaps, because it's seen an example of what can be done.

Everything I do references something that influenced me.

That word 'fantasy' - I hardly ever hear it in the world of design. And that's very strange. You should hear it a lot. I think fantasy is a very important value that designers and artists should bring to the world.

Art is a direct reflection of the life you live. What you experience comes out in your work.

I'm glad Wu-Tang was able to inspire other producers and artists, but I would never want to be erased or removed.

For me, the source material can come from anywhere. It can be a poem, it can be a dream, it can be a movie, as long as the end part of it is interesting - that's what it's about for me.

With 'The Missing Picture,' we'd shot for a year and a half already when this idea of the clay figurine, the life that comes from the earth, came to me, and I changed everything.

Being a musician, people ask you a lot about what musicians inspire you, and there's plenty of musicians that I love and respect, but I think that I'm the most inspired by cinema.

From the moment I met Martin Scorsese in 1962, he educated me about the films that had taught him so much about filmmaking. He had been deeply affected, even as a child, by great films that stretched his mind and struck into his heart, and he was eager to share them with friends and people who worked with him or with actors who were in his films.

If you're trying to do something wholly new, it's hard to fully trust it. But if you use forms that have come before, it lends your music weight and authority. It's also a way to acknowledge that it's not just you who's feeling these things. The emotions are coming through you from a whole history.

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

As one who loves literature, art, music and history, I've been deeply rooted in the Harlem Renaissance for many years.

Art begins when a man wishes to immortalize the most vivid moment he has ever lived.