David Amram Quotes

To have a National Endowment for the Arts is to sanction creativity, to provide space to support the poetic, and to give meaning to struggle, hope and life. The artist interprets and represents for us perspectives so that we can question, focus and reexamine our worlds, to imagine the possible and the impossible. The culture and arts of America are our greatest asset.

Art shows and the institutions end up being the couriers for culture for the next generation and are an important component as well. It may seem ironic from one perspective, but I think if you look at my overall strategy, it's actually not out of step.

Tradition can, to be sure, participate in a creation, but it can no longer be creative itself.

Films and gramophone records, music, books and buildings show clearly how vigorously a man's life and work go on after his 'death,' whether we feel it or not, whether we are aware of the individual names or not. There is no such thing as death according to our view!

I am interested in things happening around me, and I need to understand what's going on in other artistic sectors like music and literature.

Music is the doorway that has led me to drawing, photography, and writing.

Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does. I'm always looking for source material.

I kept on trying to use so many media and ideas in my work because our horizon is so vast and Indian culture is so rich that I think what we are today, culturally, we have a unique position and I don't think one lifetime is enough to encompass it.

I have realised how exciting and easy it is to be a time traveller by looking at paintings and films and architecture and playing music or listening to it. I don't think you necessarily have to live in the present all the time.

The trouble is, once you say something about a source, then you've pegged it down, and so now I'm reluctant to say anything. If I say I developed 50 different shapes from Mississippian tumuli, that doesn't mean they're copies of tumuli - I'm not ripping off those shapes.

I think a lot of times our culture has an attitude toward art and the production of art that separates artists from the rest of us, like making art or music or painting or whatever is some magical thing that you have to be inspired to do, and special people do it.

Without electricity, there can be no art.

The artist is called a creator.

The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.

This is the emotional thing, you see - you must galvanize people, so they want to be completely alive and live forever, or the next thing to it. And out of that comes art, then, and survival through emotion.

It is not for nothing that artists have called their works the children of their brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth.

Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.

A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything.

In art the Greeks were the children of the Egyptians. The day may yet come when we shall do justice to the high powers of that mysterious and imaginative people.

The business of every art is to bring something into existence, and the practice of an art involves the study of how to bring into existence something which is capable of having such an existence and has its efficient cause in the maker and not in itself.

An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

[ My time and our common culture] it's what I'm photographing, and I'm very involved with that.

I always urged my contemporaries to look for interest and inspiration to the development and study of drawing, but they would not listen. They thought the road to salvation lay by the way of colour.

Creation is the artist's true function; where there is no creation there is no art.

The Biblical story of the creation is an excellent parable of movement. The work of art, too, is above all a process of creation, it is never experienced as a mere product.