Paul Stanley Quotes

A great work of art is one that truly moves and inspires you. You yourself must be moved. Don't look at art with others' eyes. Don't listen to music with others' ears. You must react to art with your own feelings, your own heart and mind.

You finish a film not in the editing, but in the conversations that audiences have with themselves - and in that sense, every viewer is making a slightly different film. And that's wonderful.

I can't say what people use the experience of listening to songs for, but I would never tell somebody what it is supposed to mean. That defeats the purpose of making it. Hopefully, whoever connects with it connects with it in their own way, and it can mean whatever it is supposed to mean to them.

Any piece of art has the potential to emotionally touch you and nudge you.

People get out of music what they want to get out of it, and all I try to do is do the same thing.

The value of art is in the observer.

The most delightful aspect about the language of cinema is that it speaks to each of us in different ways - it is a purely subjective experience.

Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life.

With most of the songs and music that I've composed, irrespective of the myriad videos made, I was always careful not to overly define the experience, leaving room for people to internalize things for themselves, making their experience more integral.

If the picture speaks to me, if it tells me something about myself, then I want it. Then I have to have it.

I always hate explaining away songs, because for me they mean something, and for other people, they'll mean something absolutely different.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time.

Great Art is Great because it inspired you greatly. If it didn't, no matter what the critics, the museums and the galleries say, it's not great art for you.

People relate to songs so differently. No matter what it's about in reality, people create their own meaning behind it and connect with it on their own terms.

The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'

If buying art is to matter to us deeply, then it has to engage with our emotions and bring something to what one might as well, and with no supernatural associations whatsoever, call our souls.

The great thing about a record is it frees your imagination; it gives your eyes a rest and lets your mind wander. There's the special thing that each record can mean a different thing to every person listening to it.

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

Seeing a play, listening to music - you'll always contextualize it in your own way. Whoever you are, wherever you are; I think that's really important.

W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you.

I don't expect everyone to get something deep out of it. Some people can just listen to the music, or get their aggressions out, but I think with any great painting or movie, album or whatever it is, it's better if people can take what they need from it. That they're not forced to get some particular message.

I don't know why people see the things that they do. I wouldn't pay to see them, they don't touch me or move me in any way.

The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.

When people say, 'I don't get art' ... that means art is working.