Ellen Forney Quotes

I find great beauty in songs with a creative interpretation, but most people generally don't get that, and go for the simple songs, but I prefer something a bit more complicated, which is more meaningful to the creator.

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism.

One thing about me is that I'm very much like the Black Madonna. I love to reinvent myself and that's because I am a very free person.

It's one thing to turn up and jump around stage and give people a good time - that's obviously a big part of this - but I'll always get deeper than that as an artist.

I will say that a lot of art, some of the best art, has very powerful and meaningful messages behind it, and the more you read the stuff on the walls, the more you learn the artist's intention, and you have a totally new point of view of what it's about.

The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance.

I think good art, if I could be pretentious enough to say, I think good art deals with the micro to explain the macro.

I've written about a lot of different things, but the whole idea of writing for another character is unusual for pop music... Most of the repertory is love songs, and most of mine isn't. I don't know if that's a mental defect, or shyness, or what.

I went back to the Art Institute, then spent the summer at the Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan. That's what really awakened me. I made a lot of oil paintings and my first performance.

I'm a painter, I'm an artist. I take things too far sometimes. I really need some comfort.

We have a philosophy of we'll keep putting it up until people get it. We did that actually these last three weeks with Cracked Out from New York. People didn't really understand them. We put them up three weeks ago and they just got stared at.

One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all.

I love develop as an artist, to push my envelope, to grow, to make mistakes, to learn from them and to try and be the very best that I can be while I'm on this earth.

A work of art is like a person: it has more than one soul in its breast.

There's a lot of idiots in Hollywood, a lot of people with no imagination, so as an actor you have to constantly re-show them what you can do.

The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow.

In general I don't like definitions, but 'Minimalist' is a term that means elegance and openness, so I would prefer to be called a Minimalist than something else.

It is not enough that poetry is agreeable, it should also be interesting.

I think doing something creative is the most important thing to me, and I think it's probably just good for the soul for anyone, whatever it is. You don't have to be a film director - you can do gardening or something - but I think everyone needs to create something.

I think that anyone really can write songs, it just takes having an idea and a feeling and chasing it, and you can learn more about it. I think that's why I go to so many sessions. It is a craft that you can learn from other people. I find it to be the most fascinating thing. So I write a lot, yeah!

Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why don't we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand.

Once I started writing all the time and interacting with poets, I made a conscious decision to identify myself as a poet. It's funny how much a single word can provide focus and direction. As soon as I claimed that identity, I started clearing more and more space for poetry in my life and applying poetic tools to other areas of my life. The world became a different place, and I witnessed it through different kinds of eyes.

Art is the aesthetic ordering of experience to express meanings in symbolic terms.

You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.