Kenneth Lonergan Quotes

When I started painting 17 years ago, I never imagined that anyone would look at my work or buy my pieces. But now I do about 14 exhibitions each year.

I would like to look back on my body of work and be proud of each record in its own right, but as a whole, I want to continue to grow and move forward.

An artist needs to live to create, and to live means to suffer.

I've had a lot of opportunities to grow inside and out as a performer, artist, and a woman.

Every character that I've chosen has made me evolve as an actor. And I am lucky that my directors have shown so much faith in my abilities.

The grace to be a beginner is always the best prayer for an artist.

As a working musician, your first instinct is to try and do your job. It wasn't always my aspiration to sing; I just wanted to be a great working musician. But then Flying Lotus suggested I try, and nothing has ever been the same since.

I'm perpetually interested by living in places as an artist confronting challenges I've never confronted before and approaching them with as much craft and humanity as I can.

One is never done growing as an artiste. So, it's important to find roles that challenge me and make me learn new things.

Producing has empowered me as an artist in a specific way. It's forced a certain kind of maturity.

Every day I'm getting shaped and molded. Keepin' on, being a better artist, and improving on this, improving on that. The more I'm in it, the more I'm practicing and the more I'm advancing.

I've grown and changed, and I'm still making television and movies that I feel really proud of.

We truly experienced a lot as artists.

A lot of people start by learning other people's songs, but the idea of singing someone else's music didn't excite me. I just wanted to write my own. It was really bad to begin with. It's improved slightly since.

My initial ideas are just a starting place. As a record goes along, it becomes more about making discoveries and getting excited about new songs.

By the time I finished my first three films, I realised this is something I want to do for a long time, learn, and grow in.

An actor has to remember the primary reason why he chose the profession that he did. If every role that I do doesn't challenge me, then what is the point of being an actor?

Every film I've done, I've tried to pick ones where I can learn.

You just gotta record stuff and move on and make new material. Painters don't wait until they're in some specific gallery before they move on to the next painting.

Making art has taught me that the tiniest smidgen of progress is something to be cherished.

Getting into creating in a new genre is like arriving to a new country.

There's always stress involved in any genre or art form, there's always going to be a struggle. If there's no struggle, you wouldn't do anything. What are you going do? Retire?

Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one's life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable.

There's no such thing beneath the heavens as conditions favorable to art. Art must crash through or perish.

...assume that art begins in unhappiness. True, the goal of art is to convey a vision of coherence and peace, but the effort to develop that vision starts in the more common experience of confusion and pain.