Jeff Koons Quotes

The instinct that pulls us toward art is the impulse to evolve, to learn, to heighten and elevate our consciousness. The Ego hates this. Because the more awake we become, the less we need the Ego.

I grew up thinking art was pictures until I got into music and found I was an artist and didn't paint.

Art as a fantasy has been one of my earliest experiences. I suppose a lot of my childhood was a fantasy that involved getting away from things I didn't like. Fortunately it had some relationship to reality so that later I was able to, to some extent, act as I imagined I might.

Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.

I have no problem with religion, and I grew up with a strong curiosity about spiritual matters, but my searching took me away from church and community worship to the internal journey. Before my recovery began, I found my God in music and the arts, with writers like Hermann Hesse, and musicians like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Little Walter.

Art is interesting because there can be so many different perspectives in a piece of art. The way I see it may be completely different than the way somebody else sees it. It's interesting to hear what somebody sees in a piece of art compared to somebody else. It could be completely different, and that's interesting to me.

I decided that what I really wanted to do was go off and paint.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

I think maybe one day I'll go back to music. I don't know. I don't know if sometimes you lose a passion or you don't lose it, it becomes more personal and less about sharing it with everyone.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

I don't like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life.

My films are always a reflection of where I am in my life.

Acting opened me up.

I think everybody starts out by seeing a few works of art and wanting to do something like them. You want to understand what you see, what is there, and you try to make a picture out of it. Later you realize that you can't represent reality at all - that what you make represents nothing but itself, and therefore is itself reality.

I feel mushy these days when I think about art and artists and the work that lies ahead for us. There's good work to be done and there's joy to be found in it, I think.

When you start to think of the arts as not this thing that is going to get you somewhere in terms of becoming an artist or becoming famous or whatever it is that people do, but rather a way of making being in the world not just bearable, but fascinating, then it starts to get interesting again.

I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me, I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.

Like any art, the creation of self is both natural and seemingly impossible. It requires training as well as magic.

Usually all my tattoos came at good times. A tattoo is something permanent when you've made a self-discovery, or something you've come to a conclusion about.

Everyone has doors in the living room of their lives that they assume are locked. Doors that lead to artistic expression. People say "I have no talent -- I can't dance or sing or paint or write poetry or play an instrument." More often than not the doors are not locked, just closed. One may turn the handle, open the door and pass through into a larger life space.

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.

You live through stuff, and it affects the way you feel about the world, and you write about it.

Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes.

The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some, it's a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk. Use your natural powers -- of persistence, concentration, and insight -- to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems. make art, think deeply.

I see a movie as a way of learning about the world, about myself, and learning about my relationship with people and art.