Abbey Lincoln Quotes

My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever.

The work will stand, no matter what.

All the buzz can be very much here today and gone tomorrow, but my focus is creating music that will last forever.

Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities - their brute persistence.

It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal.

As a filmmaker, you aspire to want to make movies that can hopefully stand the test of time, but you never know when that will happen or if that will happen.

I don't want my music to be of its time; I want it to be timeless.

For truth there is no deadline.

While fashion is exciting because it changes all the time, it is also fleeting. Film, though, is forever. In a way therefore, film is the ultimate design project.

Nothing endures except truth.

The spiritual always did exist, always will. It is eternal, it is changeless.

I try to make sure that I make music that can stand the test of time.

Warwick Castle, built of the very centuries, cannot be expected to alter with time's 'brief hours and weeks' - at least, with so few of them as fall to one poor mortal's lot. From visit to visit, I find it as unchanged as the multiplication table.

Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.

Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now - always.

Painting becomes interesting when it becomes timeless.

I want to create a body of work that is entertaining and speaks to people for a long time. Longer than my life span.

Never can the innate power of a work be hidden or locked away. A work of art can be forgotten by time; it can be forbidden and rejected but the elemental will always prevail over the ephemeral.

Audiences aren't going to get rid of me. One thing I can say, with absolute certainty, is that my shows will still be performed when I'm dead, buried and forgotten. They're going to absolutely outlive me, which is a wonderful thing to think about.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.

When I'm dead, I wanna leave a body of work, like authors or great painters do. I don't wanna get ideas above my station, but why shouldn't this be comparable? Pop music was supposed to be a flash in the pan, but here we are 50 years later, and it means something to us, and it always will do. It's incredibly important.

Let it endure forever

Effortlessly, I feel like my records have longevity.

Talent survives and remains while beauty is diluted.