Alexander McQueen Quotes

When people ask what 'American Pie' is about, they're missing the point. The song isn't about the lines themselves - it's about what is between the lines. The song is about what isn't there.

People ask me if I left the lyrics open to ambiguity. Of course I did. I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.

If you want to find out what a writer or a cartoonist really feels, look at his work. That's enough.

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.

My movies are painfully personal, but I'm never trying to let you know how personal they are. It's my job to make it be personal, and also to disguise that so only I or the people who know me know how personal it is. 'Kill Bill' is a very personal movie.

Works of art are like a Trojan horse. Under the surface is always some artist's deeply held philosophy on their view of the world. But on the other hand, you do not want to make it feel like medicine. You do not want to make it feel like an afternoon TV special where you're trying to hammer a message into someone's head.

Art is observing society around you, representing it through your eyes.

My writing is not just all facts and voices. I strive to create a text that works as a sign, pointing out undercurrents that lie beneath the facts.

Messages hidden in the thickets of a story are the ones that burrow deepest because most of us don't realize that any burrowing is going on at all.

Art is a way of penetrating and going deep into our unconscious and creating amazing worlds - as the Greeks did, if you like, as did Ovid with his stories and his fantasies.

Nursery rhymes were political when they were first written! To me, that's what it's about: it's about using it to say something more than just what the story is.

As a political artist, I think you have to learn how to create art, no matter what your ideology is.

A novel - it's also a way of attacking subjects that you cannot confront in the eye.

For most of us, art is supposed to do something more than simply mirror the confusions of the world.

Everything I choose to photograph, I think is beautiful.

I don't buy into this idea that pop has to be frivolous or vacuous, and we've never subscribed to that.

Art points to things. It's a way of giving people not the standard way of looking at the world.

Take 'The Stroke,' for instance. Plenty of people saw sexual connotations in that song but to me it was about what goes on in the business world.

For me, one of the jobs of an artist is to try to see changes taking place.

If you're a photographer, you end up being the raw creative force that allows other people to see what kind of narrative you want to be giving or what kind of art that you want people to see.

My basic mission as an artist is to communicate with people. Therefore, I am conscious I have to make films that people can digest.

And what is the very essence of poetry if it is not this 'metaphorical language'-this marking of the before unapprehended relations of things?

Joe Wright is incredible and I'm a huge admirer of his work in general, but specifically his aesthetics and poeticism.

This industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy.

Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.