Richard Diebenkorn Quotes

As an artist, you have an opportunity to get in and move things around in people.

To be honest, I think, for me, the power is always with art. The art world clearly couldn't happen without art.

The artist never really has any control over the impact of his work. If he starts thinking about the impact of his work, then he becomes a lesser artist.

Giorgio Morandi's paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style.

The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.

I thought for a long time that within art, that you would come up with an idea, you would labor over it intensely until you felt like it was done, and then when you finished it, that was the final stage. I started to realize that that's not actually the completion of it. The final stage of any kind of art is to really lose control over it and let it affect other people. You can't control the effect that it has on people, but you hope that it has some sort of reaction. You just hope that they're not indifferent to it, you wanna make people feel something, whether it's love or hate.

There are no personal revelations other than feelings arising from the work itself

That's the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?

The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.

I'm focusing on writing the best story I can write. Which means I'm doing everything I can to give the artist within me as much power as possible.

If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.

I have my songs ready in my head, gather the guys, play it and then let them go with it. [The music] finds its way, we do what the music says to do......the song is the producer.

Being producer you're still going to have to sell somebody who's going to give you the money on the idea and everything like that. But it does give you a little bit more control if you're thinking in that creative process; it gives you more control to tell the story you want to tell rather than sort of just reading a script that somebody else wrote and says, "Yes, please, you can hire me for this job." So it's a little bit more hands-on, a little bit more closer to the heart.

Artists die twice. First creatively. Then physically. The second one is the easiest.

There's something exciting and incredibly liberating for an artist to finish something Friday night and the world hears it Friday night instead of eight months later after marketing people and all those assholes get involved.

A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.

I'm one dude that writes his adlibs. I don't just go in there and say "Gimme a track." I say what I'ma say here [then] I put effects on my voice. Why not? I wrote it. Why not show the talent? Why be scared? That's why I hate certain fans who hate cause it's not like raw hip-hop, like boom bap.

There's not like a science to it, necessarily, but I'm also the kind of person who spends a long time in the studio. I will spend my entire advance just getting it done, which is probably stupid, but I don't have extravagant taste. I mean, I paid for it, so there you go. Why not? The recording process is also very fun.

Some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain.

A film causes me so many worries and such a lot of reactions that I have to love it in order to get over it and past it.

Painting is a strange business.

I know when I watch certain actors or if I watch Thom Yorke sing on stage, I'm affected by it emotionally. I guess that's what we are all striving for in art but that's such a beautiful thing that happens between two people that may never even meet. So when you do get to meet someone who was affected in that way, it's awesome.

Art itself is underserved when we don't realize the power of it.

Artists everywhere steal mercilessly all the time and I think this is healthy.

If I'm collaborating with an artist I like to give them my point of view and if they don't want to take any of my recommendations it's fine, but it's hard otherwise.