Wallace Stevens Quotes

I still have a photo on my wall of the greatest idol I will ever have in my life, and it's myself at eight. Because that's when the forces of imagination have the same value as the real world, when they're an instrument of survival: when my mother disappeared, and I imagined a mother. That was me at my best.

Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

I discovered that acting gave me this spark, this thing. Honestly, it was a way to survive.

Survival is important, art is secondary. If you aren't alive, how can you create art?

Creating means living.

I feel like developing the muscle of my imagination became a way to survive reality.

In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love.

Life is serious but art is fun!

My art teacher had said that if you breathed deeply and imagined something, you could be there. You could see it, feel it. During our standoffs with the NKVD, I learned to do that. I clung to my rusted dreams during the times of silence. It was at gunpoint that I fell into every hope and allowed myself to wish from the deepest part of my heart. Komorov thought he was torturing us. But we were escaping into a stillness within ourselves. We found strength there.

Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That's why we have art.

Animation isn't the illusion of life; it is life

I think that you certainly don't have to be aged and travel the world to write a poem.

The clothes that I design and everything I've done is about life and how people live and how they want to live and how they dream they'll live. That's what I do.

I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of coping with reality, just as actors need to act all the time to make up for some deficiency in their sense of themselves.

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Designis a revelation to me. It's like taking something that is not alive and giving it form, shape, substance, and life.

Painting, for me, is a dynamic balance and wholeness of life; it is mysterious and transcending, yet solid and real.

I love to create, and to me, the ultimate freedom of expression is a blank canvas or a block of clay to capture whatever emotions your imagination gives it.

Music and art and culture is escapism, and escapism sometimes is healthy for people to get away from reality. The problem is when they stay there.

Life is very, very complicated, and so films should be allowed to be, too.

I love art, and it plays a huge role in my life. It's definitely one of my greatest joys, and I'm a bit fanatical about certain painters and poets and musicians and sculptors.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.

At night I can write for hours.