Esperanza Spalding Quotes

It would make me feel that creative art has a chance in this crazy world that we all live in.

It's a waste to not say anything with art.

Real art has been... what's the word? Kidnapped? No, that's not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

There must be so many people who have various artistic talents that, for whatever reason, just have no way of expressing them. Either they have no support from their family or they live in a part of the world, maybe they've never heard a piano or seen a piano.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

As long as artists arbitrarily assume the right to decide what is or is not art, it is logical that the public will just as arbitrarily feel that they have the right to reject it.

I definitely feel sorry more people don't get to see my films. They aren't inaccessible, and if people got the chance to see them, I know they'd like them.

For a long time, censors have been cutting my works. This makes me so sad, because many times they will tell me, 'Television won't like, so we have to cut, cut, cut!'

I'm very hard on the art world just being a big business.

I do want to keep the Wedgewood Collection in place, intact, and open to the public. Selling it off would be a real tragedy.

I think being an artist, or just being creative, or imaginative, or aware, where I think everybody starts out, and by about the age of 10, that's been pretty effectively whipped out by education.

I can only hope that the American people who have often shown their liking for my work as a painter, realizing that their access to it is hindered by institutional and governmental control, will understand the compelling motives for my gift.

Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art.

The art world's quite elitist. I tend to skirt around that world.

When art is about craftsmanship, then guys like me don't make it as artists.

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 a lot of times we think of music as being different from other art forms. You would never ask a sculptor or painter, 'Go paint this because you'll get paid more,' you know what I mean?

I simply loathe the crude 1960s distinctions between commerce and art. For me, Warhol and pop obliterated all of those separations - that was the whole point of the Brillo Boxes and Campbell's Soup Cans. And believe it or not, in 2009, moronic journalists are still saying to me, 'Your work is so commercial.'

Money messes up everything. It ruins art. The second you start putting price tags on this stuff, it's... Art isn't for just the wealthy. It's for everybody to enjoy.

The ugliest spectacle is that of artists selling themselves. Art as a commodity is an ugly idea... The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.

Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.

I think that there has been a slow recognition that there's a mind at work here, and there's a skill and some bit of artistry, and that I could probably do other things. Otherwise, I don't know that I would've been given the opportunity to do Paris, Je T'Aime.

Generally in our world, whether in architecture or almost anywhere else, we devalue the artist, and schools at whatever level shut people down.

It takes only one man to make an artist, but forty to make an Academician.

I have a general feeling that writers and artists who are in this peculiar situation, of being a persecuted artist, all anyone ever asks about is the persecution. It may well be that's the last thing in the world they want to talk about. There were many years in which every journalist in the world wanted to talk to me, but nobody wanted to talk to me about my work. That felt deeply frustrating because I felt there was an attempt to stifle me as an artist. The best revenge I could have was to write.