Lester Bangs Quotes

There are contemporary artists that I hate with all my heart. These are provocateurs that are without feeling. Where is the real emotion?

Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.

Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art.

The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: does the painter's emotions come across?

I don't have to come up with a ha-ha belly laugh every day, but drawings with warmth and love or ones that put a lump in the throat. That's more important to me than a laugh.

Great art can only be created out of love.

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

The work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself, carry you away. It is the means by which the artist conveys his passion; it is the current which he puts forth which sweeps you along in his passion.

Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

True artistic expression lies in conveying emotion.

I think anything emotional adds to your acting and singing, no matter what it is that you go through. It will always add to it, never take away.

Things that bring out your emotions are what should be in theaters and in books. That's what art is. It makes you feel things.

When I'm sitting writing, I know that something works if I've made myself cry, or laugh, or have a visceral emotion.

If you're feeling emotional when you're creating something, it'll sound that way.

We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art.

If I can't connect emotionally with the music I'm making, there's no point making it in the first place.

I think my music is a way of communicating very directly with people and with people's emotions. I try to make music that doesn't need layers of complexity or obfuscation to speak to people.

I feel like emotional content is the most important of any song, for any artist.

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

Art is the expression of the artist´s overflowing soul.

The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.

When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded.

Music gets us in touch with our emotions in a way that's more intimate than any other art form.

The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.

To love something as an artist ... means to be shaken not by its ultimate value or lack of value, but by a side of it that suddenly opens up. Where art has value it shows things that few have seen. It's conquering, not pacifying.