Jasper Johns Quotes

It's just weird because like when I was writing Cry Baby I like...the only thing that I was thinking about, when writing it, was the concepts and the visuals, and the way that it sounded kind of happened naturally.

For your songs to connect with people, they've got to mean something to you.

When you're trying to paint a portrait of a very specific world, you're trying to show what makes the world different. So, sometimes it means exaggerating certain kind of aspects, but I don't think it's that important or it's that much of an issue as long as you get an emotional truth across.

No matter how happy or hopeful I am, I always tend to drift back to that. It's underneath all the music I've ever written... An artist is trying to tell you how he's feeling. And if that accidentally becomes entertaining, it becomes a career.

I don't care about making anything new. I make music to express an emotion, and if the emotion is nostalgic, so be it.

I think there are a lot of similarities between writing and music. Music is much more direct and much more emotional and that's the level I want to be at when I'm writing. Writing is much more intellectual and indirect and abstract, in a way.

Music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

Music is more objective, I think, than a lot of art is, but a surprising amount of it is cultural.

I think myself that, rather like books, music is meant to enter into the brain, well via your ears rather than your eyes but, it's - I think a lot more should be left to the imagination.

How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive?

You think my paintings are calm, like windows in some cathedral? You should look again. I'm the most violent of all the American painters. Behind those colours there hides the final cataclysm.

For me, I'm constantly writing stuff that is what I'm dealing with on a personal, psychological level. And I think that I bring that to whatever I'm doing, whether it's being an actor or a writer or whatever it is I'm doing. I think you can't help but do that.

When we read a literary work (or, in some instances, listen to music) our imagination is stimulated, we feel various emotions, and we arrive at new judgments. These attitudes are brought into relation with many others, including our standing tendencies to think and feel in particular ways, and we try to fit our psychological capacities and responses together.

It depends on the story and the filmmaker. And it depends on the character, and the heart and soul of the person that I see on the page, and if it resonates with something that I think I can summon in myself.

You can argue with a philosopher, but you can’t argue with a good song. And I think I’ve got a few good songs.

I think that experiencing through art is a wonderful way to expand the horizon and everything around it.

Most of the really good songs are dead true. ... It had to have happened to have the song be there. Every time I've tried to make stuff up it just kind of falls flat. So the majority of my work is something that happened to me, I saw happen to someone else, or a friend of mine told me happened. There is a certain amount of theatrical and poetic license. People are supposed to like it, that's why you're doing it. It's supposed to be fun. It's not brain surgery, it's heart surgery. They're just songs.

Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three verities: geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together, as in the best work of people like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact - the affection for life.

I like to think of music as an emotional science.

If one has set for himself the position that his painting shall not misconstrue his personal mode of thinking, then he must be rather alert to just what he does think.

I guess some people like to just stick with their sound, like Weezer or something, but I think I just try to keep it as close to my real life, in a Neil Young sort of way, as possible.

I feel connected to every song on this record [ 'Modern Vampires Of The City' ], but yeah I think there's something special about 'Young Lion'. It's pretty different from any song that we've had before because the vocals are kind of between two different very simple instrumental piano melodies and it's almost like something that we call a vignette, it's sort of like a miniature.

I'm a spiritual musician, I think there has been enough political musicians and I think everything that can be said has been said about political, social things, you know, and there's still some more to be said but not much.

A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship; it may be a searching study of psychological states; it may be a nostalgic glance backward; it may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness.

I look for roles that resonate with me these days. While I love putting out just fabulous entertainment, I think now as artists, especially with so much uncertainty going on in the world, you want to be a part of things that offer or promote healing in some way and perhaps a little introspection once you leave.