Vik Muniz Quotes

We're all inspired by what has come before us, but hope to use the inspiration to create our own. That's the artist's journey. It's a pretty amazing path.

At first you're doing it for yourself, it's about what sounds good to you. It's about expressing yourself. Then you get comfortable as an artist and you find yourself and people get familiar.

I am here on Earth to express myself, and the many media of art are my magic carpets that allow me the freedom to do so.

He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise.

I'm doing things that are more artistic again, more close to the material that I love. I don't disparage those things that I did. They're just not as much reflective of who I am.

There was always a creative impulse in me but I never felt rooted to anything.

I write based on powerful inner impulses, and those seem to shift over time.

It's a great challenge and a wonderful journey how to figure out how to be an artist and to carve my way.

Like most creative people I don't fit well into boxes.

Artists are traditionally resistant to labels.

Even if a kid doesn't go into acting or the arts like I did, some kids need that environment to find themselves and find what they love to do.

I realized early on that if I became an actor, I could play a writer and a sculptor and a painter and be all the things you just don't have time to be in your lifetime. I could get to learn about all of them.

Social media has changed my life, and it taught me that you can make your own path and really find who you are as an artist, in whatever capacity.

My artistic manifesto exists in the world as poetry. So even though most of the things that I've done have been on other people's projects or could be pigeonholed in certain ways, that's not how I perceive myself.

I think that anyone who is in any way creative or is creating something, whether an architect or fashion designer, I think if you have the opportunity to create something that is fully you, it frees your mind and your spirit and gives you the opportunity to really find yourself.

I think the range of my life shows in my work.

I'm a creative person, and I'm gonna be creative, so whoever's upset because of that, that's too bad.

It took me a long time to find my own voice, even after I started making my own music.

Sometimes for a lot of new artists, they don't have a vision, really, or know what they want to say; it's kind of drawn out for them. But me, because I'm such a transcendental thinker, it's always like a journey and an adventure with each project. It's like going through a different doorway each time.

Through my films I'm eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don't know if I'm ever going to get there, but I'm slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I'm 85, I'll look back and say, 'All right, that about sums it up.'

I look at the artistic process as like experiencing the world, channeling it through your personality and sending it back out there. That's the process.

In fact, the element of play has an important role in my life, and I think that should be the case in the life of every artist. Our life is occupied with playing, whether we play an instrument or a role.

I think there's a deep impulse in most humans to do creative stuff, whether that's music or art, photography or writing. Most people at some point in their life say they want to do something creative - they want to be an actor, a director, a writer, a poet, a painter or whatever.

Art school had taught me it was far better to be a flamboyant failure than any kind of benign success.

What part of people is resistant to an artist doing more than one thing? Is it somehow perceived as greedy? Anyone who has that weird volition to become an actor probably has a weird volition to do lots of other creative things - to write, to play music, to paint, to cook.