Ruth Bernhard Quotes

Artists are overcompensating with this aggressive, energetic, hyperstimulating music - it's like someone shaking you. But it can't move people on an emotional level.

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.

Art should be life. It's an imitation of life. It should have some humanity in it.

Sometimes when you make a film you can go away for three months and then come back and live your life. But this struck a much deeper chord. I don't have the ability yet to speak about it in an objective.

The whole deal with my music has been the emotional quality.

I don't think I can create anything of lasting value unless it comes from the heart.

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

You are an artist when you make someone feel something deep and unexpected.

Photographers feel guilty that all they do for a living is press a button.

A picture is like a prayer.

if the main reason we listen to music in the first place is to hear passion expressed- as i've believed all my life-then what good is this music going to prove to be? what does that say about us? what are we confirming in ourselves by doting on art that is emotionally neutral? and, simultaneously, what in ourselves might we be destroying or at least keeping down?

When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.

Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.

To awaken human emotion is the highest level of art.

What use having a great depth of field, if there is not an adequate depth of feeling?

The purpose of all art is to cause a deep and emotion, also one that is entertaining or pleasing. Out of the depth and entertainment comes value.

What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.

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

All art is immortal. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life.

There's a cinematic quality that happens in my mind when I hear something that really lands. An album is just a journal of a life moving through time.

I use beauty as a way of helping people to receive difficult or upsetting ideas. The topical issues are merely a vehicle for making one aware of one's own perceptual shift-which is the real thrill.

A film you can explain in words is not a real film.

The thing that bothers me is that it seems like all the sensitive stuff I write just goes unnoticed . . . the media doesn't get who I am at all. Or maybe they just can't accept it. It doesn't fit into those negative stories they like to write. I'm the kind of guy who is moved by a song like Don McLean's "Vincent," that one about Van Gogh. The lyric on that song is so touching. That's how I want to make my songs feel. Take "Dear Mama" - I aimed that one straight for my homies' heartstrings.

Music and movie scripts are books. You want to be literally moved and that's the sort of things I look for.

If you want to really deeply touch the viewer or the reader, the theater might be the most powerful way to do it.