Mike Leigh Quotes

It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it ... Because I thought of the world in which I wrote -- the world I created -- as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in.

You have to learn how to do each book. It's a different world, a different show.

I think that's such an important message, especially for younger women, to know, 'I don't have to come out of the womb painting like Frida Kahlo. My very first thing that I make isn't going to be an around-the-world sensation.' You have to paint a hundred really ugly, barfy, diarrhea paintings before you come up with that one where you start to really get into your groove.

At the same time that I'm finding the color world I want, I'm also trying to make the imagery, you know, by the nature of the strokes themselves.

To change your mind under the direction of the wisdom of the heart is a brush stroke on the masterpiece you are delivering to the world.

For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.

There's a kind of slowness and inefficiency about rendering text in paint. We're in a world that's very fast, so things that slow you for a minute-give you pause-are good.

Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men.

Art happens when anyone in the world takes any kind of material and fashions it into a deliberate statement.

I've always thought that, in a sense, the more specific and sometimes even the smaller the world of a movie is, the more universal it is.

Being on set and seeing all that green screen, and how it activated my imagination, was amazing to me. I fell into that world very easily, and it was incredible to be a part of.

I don't want to sing songs and write songs that need to have images behind them that are of a specific time. The times we live in today - I mean, there's a lot to work with. But I think that if I was my age in 1975 or 1985, I would have felt the same way because that's what I gravitate toward.

This created world really helped me as an actor. It heightened everything, which made it more dangerous, more interesting and more liberating.

No matter what you go through with the business side or the Hollywood side at the end of it all, when you are there on the set, it is your thing. So it is your own private world and that's great. That's where you have that bubble to create something in.

It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal.............. Great art remains stable and unobscure because the feelings that it awakens are independent of time and place, because its kingdom is not of this world. To those who have and hold a sense of the significance of form what does it matter whether the forms that move them were created in Paris the day before yesterday or in Babylon fifty centuries ago? The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

The world is a work of art that gives birth to itself.

Poetry, which is written while no one is looking, is meant to be looked at for all time.

Cry Baby is just a character in this world that I'm trying to create, and the music videos are really important to me, and I've fought to obviously get all of them approved.

Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.

What raises great poetry above all else--it is the entire person and also the entire world.

In every artistic activity a new world is created, the cosmos, a world enlightened and free.

Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.

It's [music composition] the most effortless thing in the world because you don't do anything. I hate to say it like that, but it's the truth.

The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than is the picture. The process in fact is habit-forming