Alan Lightman Quotes

Artists put as much vitality and delight into their saintliness and escape out as most men do their escapes into similar places from respectable existence.

To be an artist means not to compute or count.

Art happens-no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.

I think everybody should just turn off their TV machines and make up their own songs about whatever comes to mind-their couch, their friends their loaves of bread. Everybody's got their own songs. There should be so many songs out there that it all turns into one big sound and we can put the whole thing into a pickup truck and let it roll off the edge of the Grand Canyon.

At moments we are all artists.

Artists are the only people in the world who really live. The others have to hope for heaven.

When it's time to make music, that's about getting lost for me. To be a control freak is not half as good as being a freak who's casually in control. You're feeling around in the dark for something that feels good.

I really feel that the talent I have is acting. Freedom and the possibility of play-that is what I like to have.

Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.

I never know what I'm going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I'm just the middleman.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes I feel like playing 'Hospital'. Sometimes I feel like playing 'Pablo Picasso'. I've been playing a lot lately. I do it as long as I feel like it.

Art is about going a little nuts... Kids do art for fun. It's playing.

I don't know, my music has always just come from where the wind blew me. Like where I'm at during a particular moment in time.

The most interesting things that happen in my books are usually the things that arise spontaneously, the things that surprise me.

Being creative is my idea of heaven. I'm just incredibly fortunate that I can do it in artwork. Watercolor is what I started out with. What I love about watercolor is that a lot of happy accidents occur.

This band makes sure that we have whole sections of stuff that are free form so that they don't know what we are doing next, that is the fun part of playing. You are playing something that you haven't ever played before.

Through literacy you can begin to see the universe. Through music you can reach anybody. Between the two there is you, unstoppable.

As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

I'm a believer in just open, free-form creativity, and you never know the surprises that life has in store, and that, purely on a creative level, there's no such thing as rules.

Stone walls confine a tinker; cold iron binds a witch; but a musician's music can never be fettered, for it lives first in her heart and mind.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, so they use them with care, with thought, with delight.

I've never been one of those guys who storyboards every frame, because that would take away some of the mystery and some of the fun.

As an artist, you find at different times you want to do different things.

I'll write songs wherever I am.