Martin Freeman Quotes

In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.

I don't think I'm making any great statements, and I certainly don't think I'm making art.

A proof of really great art is that it is generally true - it seldom falls into the misapprehensions to which minor art is liable.

Design certainly has a cosmetic, aesthetic aim. It always aims at making things beautiful. But relevance is just as important. I often say, 'If it isn't ethical, it can't be beautiful. But if it isn't beautiful, it probably shouldn't be at all.'

Generally, it's a great exercise to not get stuck in one medium too long because you begin to lose perspective on the peculiar drawbacks and strengths of the medium. For example, if I'm in the back of the stage and I want you to see my emotional change by a flicker of my eyelid, we're all going to be in for a long boring evening.

Behrens had a great sense of the great form. that was his main interest; and that I certainly understood and learned from him.

There are times when the art world seems like a religious empire. There are great cathedral galleries and pilgrimage sites where treasured art pieces are displayed like holy relics, and this can certainly be a great pleasure on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

The success of the storytellers - we're only as good as what we can withhold from the audience. Aspects of surprise and letting things play out for the audience - it's so much a part of their enjoyment. It's one of the great things about working in the movies and being a great storyteller.

We say arts education is good for general education, but that's not the point. The arts are what great nations are remembered for. They are a mirror.

A thing may fail as a poem because it tries to do what a poem cannot do: it tries to become a treatise on cosmic truth... We can best be exact about the cosmic things - God and truth, beauty, eternity and love - by not talking directly about them.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

Regina Spektor is great. I can't wait to see what more she's capable of.

Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it

Poetry is not an art or a branch of art: it's something more.

You've just got to believe that people will see and appreciate the value in the music and the artistry that we bring when they hear it.

I think that there is not really a difference between a 'Peanuts' and a beautiful Renaissance painting. There is something very romantic in the 'Peanuts' - it's at the same level of a novel or a Jane Austen story or a beautiful embroidered rose fabric. It is a piece of romanticism.

I understand, as an artist as well as a producer, the need for there to be mystery and surprise.

Art finds a way to be constructive. It becomes heat in cold places; it becomes light in dark places.

How do I define a work of art? It is not an asset in the stock-exchange sense, but a man's timid attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing.

For it is a plain fact that, most certainly in the West, the writings, works of art, musical compositions which are of central reference, comport that which is "grave and constant" (Joyce's epithets) in the mystery of our condition.

William Blake is my favorite poet of all time, and he said that he wasn't quite familiar with the sounds of music. If so, he would have been a musician.

Look, it's my misery that I have to paint this kind of painting, it's your misery that you have to love it, and the price of the misery is thirteen hundred and fifty dollars.

You are in every line I have ever read.

The artist stands on the human being as a statue does on a pedestal.