Wayne White Quotes

I have a feeling that in art the need to understand and the need to communicate are one.

The goal of art-making in general is communication.

For me, until I know that the audience really gets what I'm trying to communicate I'm not done.

Music is a simulation of something, but language is the greatest thing we possess.

All art really does is keep you focused on questions of humanity, and it really is about how do we get on with our maker.

I kind of roll my eyes when people say they make music for themselves or they make art just for themselves, because, maybe in their head, what that means is that they're making it for someone who they don't think is real. Their audience isn't real. But it's still a communicative act. It's still an outward manifestation of longing.

[In art] you are telling the reader or the listener or the viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition.

I think that if people get my music, then they get what my message is.

For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “success” and “failure” had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things.

People have to find ways of explaining the work.

Words are how people think. When you misuse words, you diminish your ability to think clearly and truthfully.

If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication - and end up shouting at one another in block capitals.

Constantly talking isn't necessarily communicating.

To help, to continually help and share, that is the sum of all knowledge; that is the meaning of art.

Form must have a content, and that content must be linked with nature.

Music is the universal language of mankind.

I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.

All art to me is an empathetic act. Whoever's telling a story is trying to transfer emotion into someone else.

Words can have the same kind of magic as riffs can.

When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.

How or by what magic is it, that we convey our thoughts to one another with such case and accuracy?

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

I can think of nothing that an audience won't understand. The only problem is to interest them; once they are interested, they understand anything in the world.