Daniel Mendelsohn Quotes

Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief - everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies.

This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.

I love fashion as an art; I love fashion as costume, as a character. I don't like dictates and the phoniness of appearance.

I think I've lived a pretty hard life. What I mean by hard is that... I've been kind of reckless with things. I'm a passionate person. I'm a super passionate person. I think there's definitely been sorrow in my life, good and bad. I think it comes through. I hope it comes through in my writing because to me that's what artistry is.

Sometimes, being different feels a lot like being alone. But with that being said, being true to that and being true to my standards and my way of doing things in my art and my music, everything that has made me feel very different... in the end, it has made me the happiest.

To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

I love singing. I love it, and it doesn't feel like a chore. It's an expression.

'Rebel' is not a word I would describe for myself, but I feel like I was a total rebel being an actor. It made me feel like there was something in me, a passion, a love - and that I didn't just squelch it.

The world isn't all happy, shiny people, and great art doesn't come from vanilla. Great art comes from people with a point of view and are very passionate.

It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.

Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song.

Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?

Each character represents a different color on the big palette of what this ultimate painting is going to look like, who your guy is, and just try to be as honest and simple and real as you can possibly be. The outer trappings are incidental - costumes, period, makeup - all of that is rather insignificant at the end of the day.

Each time I make a photograph I celebrate the life I love and the beauty I know and the happiness I have experienced. All my photographs are made like that responding to my intuition... After all these years, I am still motivated by the radiance that light creates when it transforms an object into something magical. What the eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black-and-white image is yet another transformation. What exactly exists, we may never know.

Nothing regarding man is ever inhuman. That's why I make films, not iceboxes.

Own what you are, and I mean whether that's art, or whether that's fashion, or whether that's music, or whether that's acting, or whether that's politics, or whether that's literature; it's own what you are, and grab it, and, you know, be as prolific as possible.

Is passion what we are? Is that what we are in pictures? Is what we are in pictures almost real? Maybe it's become the most real thing.

So perhaps the real secret to style is filling yourself to the absolute brim with engagement. Loving not wisely, but too well and all that.

I work very hard, you know, but I don't think that I'm working, because what I do pleases me so much. I write about certain things because certain things happen to me.

Whenever I go onstage or in front of a camera, I always want to pour my soul out because I know I have a lot to offer.

I just want to play shows and write songs and make music. That's what feels good.

I've always, always loved dancing.

I'm always vocal about people being unique and different in hip-hop.

I'm a bit of a strange human being - I love to work. I love art. I love self-expression.