Yves Klein Quotes

In Paris, I met a young American person who immediately became the primary inspiration which awakened my vision and the leading influence that had directed my forces. Throughout my career as an artist, I refer to this person by the word 'Woman.'

My father was a professional artist all his life who encouraged my path as an artist.

Sam Shepard is - I didn't tell this to Sammy, but if I had to point to one artist that made me want to do this for my life, it's Sam Shepard.

I am a very big fan of Brian Eno, of his work as an artist and making his music, and as a producer. In some ways, I have looked to his career as a model for my own.

As a woman I have felt encouraged and fed by and nurtured by the work of [Jack] Kerouac and others.

There are a lot of photographers who have influenced me; some of the great ones, like Herb Ritts, Helmut Newton, and [Alfred] Stieglitz. I draw from all of them. You're supposed to steal from the good ones.

Painters can study the masters can't they? Musicians can hear Beethoven. What will filmmakers do?

Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?

How much the work of an artist owes to an art movement to which he belongs can never be determined exactly, if only because the movement derives its character from the individual creations of its members.

I know for me as an artist, I think I do myself and my listeners a disservice, if I don't listen to some of the best music out there. If I was an architect or a carpenter, I'm going to want to study the best architects and carpenters and I'm going to appreciate their work, because they're going to inspire me to do well. And I just look at them as great architects and I just appreciate the gift that God gave them.

I went to South Africa - Durban, Cape Town, Johannesburg - and those were definitely the "I've arrived" shows. Outside of the money, the success, the accolades ... This is a place that we, in urban communities, never dream of. We never dream of Africa. Like, "Damn, this is the motherland." You feel it as soon as you touch down. That moment changed my whole perspective on how to convey my art.

It would be nice to abandon the verse-chorus-bridge structure completely, and make it so none of these things are definable. ... Make up new names for them. Instead of a bridge, you can call it a highway, or an overpass. ... Music should never be harmless. ... I remember from my earliest years, people speaking, you know, in a certain kind of rhythm and telling stories and sharing experiences in a way that was different in Indian country than it was other places. And I was really struck by this and obviously very affected by it, because it's always come out in my songs.

Ultimately I have learned more about poetry, from music and magic than from literature.

David Lynch is very important to me, and he does dreamlike movies, but my dreams are not like David Lynch's dreams. I have no interest in copying anybody's work. It would never occur to me to want this to look like someone else's thing.

The modernist writers found despair inspirational.

I said earlier that I do not believe an artist's life throws much light upon his works. I do believe, however, that, more often than most people realize, his works may throw light upon his life. An artist with certain imaginative ideas in his head may then involve himself in relationships which are congenial to them.

We've been around long enough that there have certainly been people at every stage of our career telling us about one or another record being influential to their lives in one way or another. It's always nice to hear that stuff.

If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality.

We're creators by permission, by grace as it were. No one creates alone, of and by himself. An artist is an instrument that registers something already existent, something which belongs to the whole world, and which, if he is an artist, he is compelled to give back to the world.

I think what we should concentrate on is what it feels like to be a working artist in the day to day. One doesn't imagine what comes down the line.

I don't think there is room for 'artistic temperament.' Professional artists understand art is a business. If businesses ran their companies like many artists do their careers, they would not stay open a year.

Most of my horror inspiration is really older stuff and really new stuff.

Just in terms of being able to be a professional artist, but also it's nice to not have to dread introductions. "What you do for a living?" It used to be easier just to tell people that I was a magazine illustrator than try to explain that I did comics, but not the kind of comics that they were used to, and no, it's not pornography, etc. And now people even of our parents' generation are familiar with the term "graphic novel," which is kind of amazing.

Authorship is not a trade, it is an inspiration; authorship does not keep an office, its habitation is all out under the sky, and everywhere the winds are blowing and the sun is shining and the creatures of God are free.

Art comes from art: I remember going to the Matisse show and seeing how Matisse had taken one of his own paintings, worked from it and transformed it, and that had led on to the next one and the next.