Mike Leigh Quotes

It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism.

Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.

Great art should be shown with great excitement.

One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

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

No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.

I want to make it clear: it's not that I hate mainstream cinema. It's perfectly fine. There are a lot of people who need to escape, because they are in very difficult situations, so they have the right to escape from the world. But this has nothing to do with an art form.

The older painting - well, it does have an effect all at once, I suppose, but it's of a lesser intensity than a lot of the American work in the last ten or fifteen years.

I think that some works are more accessible than others.

Art is expression, and to have high expression you must have something high to express.

If you make a record, you should ask yourself, 'Did it make someone cry, in a good way, not a bad way?' There should almost be subjective emotional criteria for evaluating work, instead of just profitability.

What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.

The idea that popular arts were shallow by definition and the traditional arts were profound was dead, I thought, and I wanted to prove it.

A painting has to be beautiful. Even in its grotesqueness.

Take Tom Sachs as an artist. His brain is more brilliant than anything, so of course, anything he puts out over a ten-year period is going to continue to be super relevant. But if you look at some artists, they have one good idea, but unless you know where it's coming from, it's not going to be lasting.

I am an artist, and I have a lot more to offer than just being a one-dimensional character, and I think our audience sees that and understands that - they're behind it.

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

Great art always transcends its culture, while lesser art merely reflects it.

Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.

That sculpture is more admirable than painting for the reason that it contains relief and painting does not is completely false. ... Rather, how much more admirable the painting must be considered, if having no relief at all, it appears to have as much as sculpture!

It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous work. Image...that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.

There is a better chance of getting an exciting painting from a laboured study with texture than from a fine drawing without it.

That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives. All the attendant hoopla about it, the success over it or the critical rejection—none of that really matters. In the end, the thing will survive or not on its own merits. Not that immortality via art is any big deal. Truffaut died, and we all felt awful about it, and there were the appropriate eulogies, and his wonderful films live on. But it’s not much help to Truffaut.

While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.

As my uncle always says, 'If your vibe outweighs your substance, you're destined to be a novelty.' I think that is true in all art.