Shepard Fairey Quotes

An artist's job is to surprise himself. Use all means possible.

The individual - man as a man, man as a brain, if you like - interests me more than what he makes because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.

You cannot possibly invent painting all by yourself.

It's not about perfection. What's a perfect painting? What's interesting about a perfect painting?

Why not do something strange and different for once? Artists can do whatever they want!

Creativity means learning where the rules exist, and then breaking them! Saying, "It's better this way." But you have to know the rules in order to break them with any grace.

Genius is personal, decided by fate, but it expresses itself by means of system. There is no work of art without system.

Art always demands of us something new.

If I begin writing a poem that means I'm intrigued in some way by whatever it's about and that if I'm not trying to find something new and pushing the envelope in the poem I can't expect my reader to be particularly excited about it either.

I shall create! If not a note, a hole./If not an overture, a desecration.

When you make something that everyone likes, it's very easy to say, "Well, I'll just repeat that." Because that was easy. I have a formula. But creatively, it's not very interesting.

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.

When I start writing songs, and they come easily, I'm always very suspicious. That usually means they're reminding me of something I've already done before. When the songs become unsettling, and I feel anxious about what I'm doing, that usually means it's going to be more interesting later on when we actually record the stuff.

The beauty of ideas is that they are like waves in the ocean and they connect with things that came before them, and I think it is very important to embrace things that interest you and influence you, and incorporate them into what you do, as all artists have always done. The ones that say they don’t, are lying. Or are afraid that their work won’t be seen as being original, somehow.

Art only begins where Imitation ends.

Bring something incomprehensible into the world!

I love to create. I love to make magic. I love to create the unexpected.

My originality consists in putting the logic of the visible to the service of the invisible.

Without playing with fantasy, no creative work has yet come into being.

It is vain for painters... to endeavour to invent without materials on which the mind may work.

Everybody is completely different. I think there is no formula for filmmaking. Everybody finds their own way of doing things.

Creativity is contagious. And so is banality. Criticism is an art in itself. Don't let the dullness around destroy the creativity within. T.S. Eliot said, "honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry." Good to remember.

The greatest joy in getting ready for the film is that there aren't many reference points for the journey and you've got to define it for yourself.

People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined.