Natasha Trethewey Quotes

I used to sing songs and write with my uncle, Bill Owens.

I come from very creative parents.

All of them - my father, mother, step-mother, and grandmother - were all wonderful actors and performers and they are an inspiration to me, both in their craft and in their humanity.

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.

Art shows and the institutions end up being the couriers for culture for the next generation and are an important component as well. It may seem ironic from one perspective, but I think if you look at my overall strategy, it's actually not out of step.

There have always been great defenses of poetry, and I've tried to write mine, and I think all of my work and criticism is a defense of poetry to try and keep something alive in poetry.

The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.

Everyone in my family is an artist. Both my parents are painters and my mom's an opera singer. I was never shown any other way to process life.

How do you rebel in a family of rebels? That's the age-old question. I guess I could have by not going into the arts, but the thing is, I couldn't do anything else.

One can't deny what has happened to us in the past. The secret is to enjoy and be proud of the music we've created and the people with whom we have been linked. It's all a long chain of involvement in the world, and we are proud to be yet another link in this chain.

I love art. My sister is an artist and my mother is a painter, so it is very much in the family. I haven't ever wanted to be a fine artist myself - my sister robbed me of my artistic talent, I think.

Like immense time-binding discussions, genres allow ideas to be developed and traded, and for variations to be spun down through decades.

I am from a family of artists. Here I am, making a living in the arts. It has not been a rebellion. It's as though I had taken over the family Esso station.

I have a strong and strange character, and I've rarely met directors who knew what to do with this character. One of the few who did was my father, and in the theatre, Arthur Nauzyciel.

I was writing poems when I was young, you know, because my father was a poet, so it was absolutely normal to follow my father.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example.

I give talks to theater arts departments, and I don't know what I'll say. I don't plan a thing. It's just the energy of these young people. They're the next generation, and what they have is very representative of how I felt when I was 19 or 20 or so. I'm really happy to be with them.

It's just weird that for some people, art is a luxury. My parents had no artistic outlet. Some people pass down music to their kids, but I couldn't tell you what my mom's or dad's favorite song is. So when I started going out into the world, I was drawn to people who knew about movies, art, even fashion.

Art was a way of life in my family. My grandfather, N.C. Wyeth, who died a year before I was born, had been a prominent painter. So was my father, Andrew. My two aunts and two of my uncles also earned a living as painters.

Growing up in Chadds Ford, Pa., I shuttled between studio space in my parents' house and my grandfather's studio just up the hill. It was a solitary childhood, but I loved it.

I've always adored my father's music, but ever since I'd started singing, whether it was while I was still a student at the University of Massachusetts or professionally, I avoided Dad's material.

Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.

That's another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, 'Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?' And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people.

My parents were artists, so my salvation was to make pretty things - and ultimately delicious things at the same time.