Jenny Lewis Quotes

Life is more important than art; that's what makes art important.

Life is more important than work.

My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art.

I suppose one has to remember that 'life' is important too, though it's something I forget in some moods, everything except work seeming like an interruption or really non-life.

Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.

I think my stance and my way of life is my most important art.

Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.

A life lived for art, is never a life wasted.

I think the first duty of all art, including fiction of any kind, is to entertain. That is to say, to hold interest. No matter how worthy the message of something, if it's dull, you're just not communicating.

You know when I think about what I'm doing - what I'm doing and the way I'm doing it is more important to me than any amount of money or anything like that because it's my artistic work.

I come from a family of lawyers. I was expected to be a professional of some sort, not an artist. I was never uplifted for my art.

I don't think you need to be so result-oriented when you're trying to define the success of an art work. I think we can allow some unpredictability.

I think that one of the things is that, if you are going to decide to be a painter, you have got to decide that you are not going to be afraid of making a fool of yourself. I think another thing is to be able to find subjects which really absorb you to try and do. I feel that without a subject you automatically go back into decoration because you haven't got the subject which is always eating into you to bring it back - and the greatest art always returns you to the vulnerability of the human situation.

I’m not as cool as you think I think I might be – and the most important things in my life are God, love and peace. Everything else is b.s. And art’s kind of important, too.

I am afraid that as evangelicals, we think that a work of art only has value if we reduce it to a tract.

Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

It's sometimes hard to talk about politics and art. Obviously, I have my core beliefs, but I think art is best when it's troublesome and pushes against stuff.

As I grew older, I developed a very innate passion for art. I was actually pretty good at it.

I have always been aware of different movements and directions in art. But, in general, I'm always bored by any kind of generalization when it comes to artists. I think that there are just single individuals, who are valuable, and they work outside of any group.

I think everyone is always asking themselves, How is my work meaningful, how is my life meaningful? As I get older, I feel like who I am as a person and a citizen is more important than who I am in my work. But I do think it reframed slightly for me, how much I have to care about a project in order to want to do it. Sometimes, obviously, you have a take a job for money. But I think I'm quicker now when I get a script that's, say, borderline misogynist, I'm not going to go in for it. I'm thinking more about what I'm putting into the world.

You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce so denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art.

But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately,almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.

There's actually a disdain for the conversation about audience in the art world. Artist to artist, if you say, "What do you think about audience?" they would probably say, "I don't think about audience, I only think about my work," yet the audience is such an important part.