Joshua Bell Quotes

The writers that I aspire to, like Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman, they'll tell you that the work gets harder, not easier. And they set that bar for us where we're always striving to do something better than the last time, whether it's the next song or just the next line.

I've always wanted to do my best to make sure it's clear that I want to keep the focus on my music.

Some musicians feel they have to provide what their audiences expect. They lose the distinction between an artist and an entertainer. I am not an entertainer.

I have refused money sometimes for a film. I have refused films when I felt that it was not for me. When it was just a job or just about making money, I said no. I wanted to make every film count, and when you are true to yourself, this gives you a certain integrity and a certain reputation.

With my work in 'Mardaani' being well-received, I am more aware than ever that I have to keep the game up. I don't want to disappoint myself as an actor first and let my audience down.

I do everything I watch, whether it's like a big comic book film that I've done or something very serious and raw.I do have that initial feeling like I'm the worst, this is awful, my work is - I've let everybody down. I definitely have that.

The challenge is to balance the technical elements and what is required of us with being artists and telling a story.

Rules limit you, and once you start thinking about what the audience wants or expects, it becomes a trap that a lot of artists fall into.

Of course, music is an art form, and it's not all that competitive. But we don't ever intend to be the second-best band on a stage at any show.

Why should I waste my good time making a straight dramatic film? The people who can't make you laugh can do that.

When you get above the line, you're above the line. So my thing is I just want to make music where I am always above that line.

We really just try not to think about the scrutiny and the pressure. We're just trying to make the show that we like, and we're working really hard at it.

You have to play the character in the best way you know how and do what you need to do in order to bring that character to life and not worry about the millions of people that you may be disappointing!

I make every movie and every scene like it could be my last. That's the only way I know how to make cinema that stands on its feet. I have to treat it like that. It has to be life and death stakes.

What I like or dislike in music is my internal affair. I never want an audience out there to be influenced because John said. I don't want to have to endure that kind of nonsense. I work for the art of the individual.

Hollywood people don't want to be embarrassed by being involved with someone who isn't happening and cool at the time. But I never made the movies for the critics; I've done the best I could with the material and the directors and the actors I had. But the thing that's really exciting is that once I do that one project that's different, that stands out, everyone's gonna be watching.

People come with expectations and as a bandleader I constantly try to remind the audience to leave its expectations in the lobby.

I've turned down a lot of stuff. I've read several scripts and said "That's not me, I'm not interested in doing that." It's got to be something that inspires me and captures my imagination. I want to be able to say "There's a challenge.".

I have my views and obviously my music has connotations that lean toward what I believe, but I've learned through other artists' mistakes that I'm never going to use my career as a platform for politics, especially at shows. People come to hear music. It's my job to entertain them, and it's my escape too.

Two seconds are a thousand years.

I paint the way I do because I can keep on putting more and more things in - like drama, pain, anger, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas of space. It doesn't matter if it differs from mine, as long as it comes from the painting, which has its own integrity and intensity.

Nothing I've worked on has been asked this much of me to put it on the page [like Paper Girls].

My point is that the great challenge of an artist is to balance those two things: to be strong enough to have your own personal vision that you will put on the page or the canvas or the screen, no matter what people say, but it requires a radical sensitivity. You have to be completely open to what the world is telling you, to what your audience tells you. And balancing those two things is nearly impossible.

Painting is a strange business.

Ballet dancers are a self-chosen elite. To survive and surmount years of disciplinary preparation and seasons of even more arduous performance requires rigid determination and almost mindless self-abnegation. One other factor is difficult to predetermine: without a certain admixture of hysteria - sometimes masking as self-obsession, sometimes even counterfeiting incipient madness - performers, at once acrobats, artists, and animals, make little public impression.