Lydia Millet Quotes

What's important is the work that you're doing, not the country that you're in. I would much rather be in a play at the Royal Court than in Los Angeles making 'Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.'

But the drawings are not created only to be sold.

After all, the work isn't the point; the piece is.

No matter how lofty a film is, it becomes a product after entering the market. It has a price. I think no matter what your purpose of shooting it, it has to have artistic value and then sell. But you can't make money if it doesn't have artistic value.

There is no point in doing a lengthy role if there is no importance in it.

I always thought from my knowledge of London theater and the audiences here that they would appreciate a truly genius piece of theatrical work.

You hope, when you're working on these things, that people love them whether it makes a lot of money or not.

It is always understood as an expression of condemnation when anything in Literature or Art is said to be done for effect; and yet to produce an effect is the aim and end of both.

I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.

At the end of the day, it's nice to walk away from a set knowing that you're doing a movie that is not just for money and is not just pure entertainment.

There's no art where there's no fee.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

One filmmaker makes films that are deep, intellectual, profound and confrontational. And the other one makes purely vacuous, escapist films. I'm not sure the one who makes escapist films is making a poorer contribution than the one who makes the deeper films.

Art is something that nobody laughs at and nobody makes any money out of is the attitude, which I would dispute.

That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives. All the attendant hoopla about it, the success over it or the critical rejection—none of that really matters. In the end, the thing will survive or not on its own merits. Not that immortality via art is any big deal. Truffaut died, and we all felt awful about it, and there were the appropriate eulogies, and his wonderful films live on. But it’s not much help to Truffaut.

The insignificant labor, the great create.

I don't know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the 'essential dimension,' the thing that makes great works of art great.

Art is when we do work that matters in a creative way, in a way that touches (people) and changes them for the better.

The only things that distinguish the photographer from everybody else are his pictures: they alone are the basis for our special interest in him. If pictures cannot be understood without knowing details of the artist's private life, then that is a reason for faulting them; major art, by definition, can stand independent of its maker.

Only the work of art itself can raise the standard of taste.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden. It is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

There is no such thing as 'on the way out' as long as you are still doing something interesting and good; you're in the business because you're breathing.

The morality of art is in its very beauty.

It is not so easy to obtain a reputation by a perfect work as to enhance the value of an indifferent one by a reputation already acquired.