Willem de Kooning Quotes

I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it - drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea.

Animators can only draw from their own experiences of pain and shock and emotions.

Regardless of the medium, be it television or feature or documentary, I'm not gonna distinguish and worry about my particular canon, whatever that means.

It has nothing to do with commercial success. You cannot calculate in your head how to put the mosaic together to make a commercial film: that's out of the question.

The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world... the picture... which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him.

I'm a painter, I'm an artist. I take things too far sometimes. I really need some comfort.

What counts is putting the intensity that you yourself have experienced into the picture. Otherwise it is just a document.

The filmmaking process is a very personal one to me, I mean it really is a personal kind of communication. It's not as though its a study of fear or any of that stuff.

The artist never really has any control over the impact of his work. If he starts thinking about the impact of his work, then he becomes a lesser artist.

If I'm not crying while writing a song, I'm not doing it right.

I have to go with what the painting says to me. The painting is always informing me. I'm its servant; it's not mine. I'm doing what it wants.

If you're an artist, it's great to have a knowledge of the business and be educated about that, but you've got to keep the balance right between business and artistry; otherwise, you get cynical.

The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

As an artist I'd choose the thing that's beautiful more than the one that's true.

I like my drawings to be direct. I don't generally work on them for too long, but that doesn't mean that they are not works in their own right.

If you're feeling emotional when you're creating something, it'll sound that way.

What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.

I have a desire to create more film, more beauty, more art, more love, but I don't feel desperate. It's not about creating or building a career.

I don't really understand why everybody doesn't want to direct. It's an absolutely fascinating combination of skills required and puzzles set on every possible level, emotional and practical and technical. It calls upon such a wide variety of skills. I find it completely absorbing.

What people don't understand is that how you are as an artist depends on how you are emotionally.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don't know what that is; I don't think too much about that.

I read things and imagine them and then kind of start trying to kind of take what I imagine and make it visual for everybody else to see. It just happens to be my personal vision, and every person's is going to be different, every book reader.

Artists are the gatekeepers of truth.

When the uncreative tell the creative what to do, it stops being art.