Michael Tilson Thomas Quotes

As an artist myself, I know what it's like to put your heart and soul into something. You can feel the presence of another person.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

To paint well, I need to be enraptured by my subjects.

The artists that I love- whether painters or filmmakers- it's because something resonates in me because I've felt it.

But when I was twelve years old I caught my first strong glimpse of one of the fundamental forces of existence, whose votary I was destined to be for life - namely, Beauty.

Human requirements are the inspiration for art.

In music, you feel a connection to the voice and think about the person behind it. In art that's secondary.

There are conscious reasons and unconscious reasons why I pick something. You know, I have to be moved by the story and usually that means it has to touch me in some kind of personal place.

I just want to make art that connects with people and moves them on an emotional level. Any time I can put out music and place a story behind it and have people watch it and go, 'Wow, I was affected by that,' to me, feels like I've done my job.

If the picture speaks to me, if it tells me something about myself, then I want it. Then I have to have it.

I wanted to get to that aesthetic proposition that comes out of learning the human elements of a world, so that those notes and rhythms mean something to you besides just the academic way in which they fall in place.

I can't design anything unless I'm excited by it, meaning I have an urge to wear it.

Music's something you feel. You have to feel it first before you hear it.

If you're making music for all the right reasons, people are going to be receptive to that and appreciate it the same way you did when your were writing it.

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

The thought came to me that all one loves in art becomes beautiful. Beauty is nothing but the expression of the fact that something is being loved. Only thus could she be defined.

Vivid images are like a beautiful melody that speaks to you on an emotional level. It bypasses your logic centers and even your intellect and goes to a different part of the brain.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

I believe in working with songs that have personal value for me.

I got the 'Max Rose' script, and I fell in love with it. It just hit me. It was something that needed to be made.

Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

I honestly just hope to continue creating music that people can relate to and connect with in a personal way.

If you make something from your heart, of course you want it to connect with the people.

The feeling that you want the listener to get, you should get yourself when you first hit that chord, and that melody comes to mind.

I am not really into paintings, to be honest, but for me, the art I love is when I see singers putting their heart into their song, actors giving the performance of their lives, and books and movies that make me feel something I never thought I could; there's art in everything as long as it's made with soul.