Shepard Fairey Quotes

I looked at Rembrandt and Superman, Matisse and Bugs Bunny, and began to make my own pictures.

Art must unquestionably have a social value; that is, as a potential means of communication it must be addressed, and in comprehensible terms, to the understanding of mankind.

With a movie you're creating from the beginning this particular work, let's not call it work of art, because very few movies are works of art, let's just call them bits of popular culture, whatever they are, sometimes very rarely by accident a movie becomes a work of art.

Their films would probably be better if they'd seen a few more films, which runs counter to this idiotic theory that you run the risk of being influenced if you see too much.

The point is that the arts are important enough to have influenced the greatest minds and talents we know. Albert Einstein said that if he were not a physicist, he would probably be a musician.

More than my films being influenced by manga I was indelibly impressed by Manga, and that definitely comes out in the films.

I believe that art can make relevant and progressive contributions to culture and society.

It just sort of happened. I wrote like what I'd always read and what was in the movies... I'm sure popular music is supposed to be like this.

My favourite stuff is visual, and I always want to work with visual artwork. I think it depends on the person, but for me, photographs of an image of something interesting or inspiring is worth a lot more than words to me. I think every concept I've come up with and turned into films or that will be hopefully become a film comes from images first.

Good advertising is a happy wedding of words and pictures, not a contest between them.

A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.

He [Andy Warhol] engaged people and I think all of that is what helped keep him keyed in to the times beyond all of the celebrity stuff that was going on around him. He was much more like a fan than a celebrity himself.

Artists die twice. First creatively. Then physically. The second one is the easiest.

If I have an idea I want to put in a movie, I know what camera will make that look best, and I have ideas for future projects and stuff I'd like to build for those. I think it's just part of how I work, though.

How do you capture the drama of a Rembrandt painting in a movie? How do you feel that moment that they captured in two hours? I kind of fell into it and at one point, I decided I wanted to live an art life; I wanted to tell stories. I came to New York, and did what most people do - you become a PA and run and get coffee and pay your dues and learn until your opportunity comes.

It is an intimately communicative affair between the painter and his painting, a conversation back and forth, the painting telling the painter even as it receives its shape and form.

What the soul is to the body, so is the artist to his people.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

I think the best thing I learned from drawing comics is that it's a great exercise in concision.

All photography is Pop, and all photographers are crazy... they feel guilty since they don't have to do very much - just push a button.

You know, artists are influenced by other artists. We're all deeply influenced by what's around us; we don't make anything cold. Sometimes we think that we do. But within that, the most important part is that even though we're influenced, what are the levels of invention that we carry forth even as we've been influenced by something that's come before?

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

I didn't give any instruction to the video, because it was a new medium. I didn't know what to tell him; it was so young. I did the piece and immediately after the piece, I wanted to see the material.

Pictures you have taken have an influence on those that you are going to make. That's life!

I think art parallels life; it is not a report on nature or on intimate disclosure of inner secrets. Color, in my opinion, behaves like man -- in two distinct ways: first in self-realization and then in the realization of relationships with others.