David Means Quotes

What I am interested in now is the landscape. Pictures without people. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually there are no people in my pictures. It is so emotional.

I use a lot of similes and metaphors when I work, simply because it's my best way of describing a building or a scene. I'm terrible at describing landscapes - trees, buildings. The inanimate things don't interest me: I always think, "Oh, no, here comes another building I have to describe." So I usually use a simile or metaphor.

Of course you can still paint landscape - it's not been worn out.

If landscape is a character for me, then it helps if I'm familiar with it and I already have a take on it.

I'm just a landscape painter. I look out the window and I see what's going on, and I paint it. While I'm painting it, I also write thoughts about what I see going on out there.

A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the 'Modifier's Madness.' A lot of adjectives working overtime.

Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character.

All gardening is landscape painting.

I was trying to be a writer, and I was kind of getting sidetracked, so I started doing cartoons as a form of expression.

Be able to describe anything visual, such as a street scene, in words that convey your meaning.

Beauty of expression is so akin to the voice of the sea.

Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.

Whatever you do in life, there's content and form; only those two put together create special meaning of a great work of art or great interpretation of music or a great story that you tell.

Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.

It is my intention to present - through the medium of photography - intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.

You speak of Lord Byron and me; there is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task.

'The Gardener' is more than a marvellous collection of images by a master photographer.

I've never put myself in the mindset that I'm actually any good at taking pictures, I just love to shoot things that catch my eye, whether it's landscapes or just my kids.

I have kept a diary as long as I can remember, and drawings are really another kind of diary.

When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.

One of my biggest Disney influences in terms of world-building on this record was a background painter named Eyvind Earle, who was working in the '50s. He would make hyper-modern shapes that were sharp retellings of pastoral themes.

Writing is an art, just like any other creative exercise - painting a picture, singing a song or dancing. It is an expression of your feelings.

My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.

In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you'll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.

In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.