Junot Diaz Quotes

It was actually the enormous risks I took with my pictures, skating right up to the edge of non-acceptance, that paid off so handsomely.

The main thing as a director, you always want to have a bit of a worry about the material you're going to get yourself into. You want to be a bit scared of it so that you have that excitement of having to climb the mountain.

That's the joy of art - it should be dangerous and challenging but it's just art - it's safe.

I think I come from a time when all the artists I grew up with and I loved always used to try and push the boundaries, and there doesn't seem so much of that, really.

Art is all about giving yourself these terrifying challenges, these peaks to climb. You're at the bottom of the mountain at the start of every new project thinking, 'Am I going to make it?'

When I'm at my best, I'm trying to destabilize myself and figure out new ways of approaching art as a provocation. I think I am at my best when I push myself into a place where I don't have all the answers.

As an artist, I have been a risk-taker. And I've done a lot of different things. I don't make it easy for people. Identification is difficult. One doesn't recognize my art right away.

Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?

I like people that challenge their art, not only in the purist way, but also in terms of how they could provoke and make something different.

I think doing variations on a classical theme is a dangerous thing to do.

There is something very strange and unsettling for me about making a work that doesn't fit with what's the norm or what's acceptable. There's something both liberating about it and challenging. I can imagine it doing more harm than good.

I think people who make movies and have invested a lot of money in them get frightened that if they challenge an audience they are going to repel them. And I think the opposite; it's really true.

I want to change things with everything I do, not for the sake of changing things, but for the sake of taking greater and greater risks, or how minimalist I might be able to be, or how I can involve elements or ingredients in music videos that are not musical, for instance.

The idea behind the Anti Tour was people asking me how I would top the 'Aphrodite' tour... I thought the best option was to go completely the other way. I always tried to be that way - sometimes it works and sometimes you fall flat on your face.

We have to take risks with art. If we don't, it all becomes a bit boring.

I don't investigate things by writing about them, but let them build up inside of me.

I think I would do a much better job if I had a chance to do things that were edgier than I get to do in comedies.

I want to be the kind of artist who keeps pushing on every album. I don't want to settle on a sound.

I always feel that art in general and acting in particular should make the audience a little uncomfortable, to slap them and wake them up.

I think it's the responsibility of a designer to try to break rules and barriers.

I've always liked artists like Chris Burden, who would take performances, put them in galleries, and then do things that were on the edge.

To be a truly conscientious artist, you have to look at what's not working and challenge it. You riff on things.

Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself.

Yes, every venture is always filled with apprehensions. But if we were to conduct ourselves continuously on that aspect, then we would lose the most important reason to be in this profession: to challenge the art of and be part of what is commonly known as our creative instincts.

To me, directing movies is just that. It's a need to question myself and set the things that disturb me on the table.