Rudolph Rocker Quotes

New York is an incredible place to be an artist, because there are so many incredible people, and... it's all about the people that you get exposed to.

I never do any album to beat it. I do it to extend it.

If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it.

As an artist, you tend to gravitate to the opposite. I know, when I finish a song or an album, I'm interested in doing something completely new. It doesn't always happen, but that's the idea. My poor fans - I don't know if they love that or hate that.

If you had only truth, goodness, and harmony on your side, and the complete absence of the other, there would be no creative impulse.

I think that new artistic challenges help you grow both as a person, as an artist, and then they feed back into your other work, and tend to magnify it.

I'm a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I'm an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

I've always wanted to do things differently, and if one person or ten people are doing the same, then I want to do it differently. I love to travel, I love art, I love fashion. I love going to great restaurants and trying different things. Different cultures are inspiring to me.

No doubt, it is useful for an artist to know all the forms of art which have preceded or which accompany his. That is a sign of strength if it is a question of looking for a stimulus or recognizing mistakes he must avoid.

I feel that every professional is the art school for the next guy. I feel that maybe a lot of the dynamism in my own work, having been felt by the rest of the artists, they'll react to it and put elements of that in their own work, feeling that it'll help it.

Artistically, you want to be able to do a lot of things that can challenge you to not just stay in the same thing.

I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.

I think there is a period of esthetic discovery that happens to a man and he can do all sorts of things at white heat.

It's only those exceptional and rare individuals who have brilliant ideas delivered to them by the muse, complete and gift wrapped. The rest of us have to work at it.

When the eye or the imagination is struck with an uncommon work, the next transition of an active mind is to the means by which it was performed

Drawing is exercise for a restless imagination.

Art demands of us that we shall not stand still.

Everyone wants a definition of creativity that makes what they do into something special and what everyone else does into nothing special. But the fact is, we're all creative. We come up with weird and interesting ideas all the time. The biggest difference between 'creators' isn't their imagination - it's how hard they work. Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard.

Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank.

The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer

Everything in the world was about creativity: belief and creation. Storytelling was the essence of both.

Society develops wit, but its contemplation alone forms genius.

Cultural diversity and cultural change are desirable and inevitable. We are cultural animals, someone without a culture is not human. But the cultures we possess vary enormously. Indeed, the variability, over time and space is the great evolutionary advantage of humanity. Instead of changing biologically over millennia, human beings can change culturally over decades

How much the work of an artist owes to an art movement to which he belongs can never be determined exactly, if only because the movement derives its character from the individual creations of its members.