Steve McQueen Quotes

I try to place what I creatively have to say above who I am.

I don't think of myself as making art. I do what I do because I want to, because painting is the best way I've found to get along with myself.

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down... some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

I don't consider myself an artist. I consider myself a very opinionated man who uses words as fighting tools.

Motherhood informs my work 100 per cent.

There's actually nothing interesting about me except what I write.

Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.

If a woman decides she likes me, it would behoove her to take into consideration that my art has had a strong influence on the type of person I am.

I like being a writer.

In my own defense, I wrote a one-man show, and that to me was more where I fit.

We became the songs we wrote.

Every artist in the world likes his or her work to make people think.

The reason that I'm an actor, or an artist, is ultimately because I'm trying to paint a self-portrait, and the most complete and beautiful self-portrait that you can.

I think I'm very real as a person, and that comes across in my work.

I think that's always the goal of art, is to make people ask themselves questions.

If I have a certain opinion, I try to incorporate that into my work.

My job is to express myself.

I love cinema and creating new things, but essentially, I am creating all this because I want people to see it.

As an artist, I often wonder what my purpose is or why I do what I do.

I believe all of us should have the freedom to have our personal take on how art affects us.

I try to put my own history in my work.

I think being an artist is having the courage to be original. Many great artists, including Picasso, have all been influenced by the great master paintings... And then finally, they leap, they take off... they become themselves. Then it looks like they just came out of nowhere. Just like 'Pow!'

To express yourself needs a reason, but expressing yourself is the reason.

I'm going to put every aspect of myself out into the world and try to convey it through photography.

I feel like if I were to play the game completely and just get myself in a giant bottle of nail polish and put myself on display, I would feel like I had somehow cosmically lost. I feel like I'm taking a bunch of the ingredients and using some of them but not all of them and shuffling around and making people think I'm doing my job.