Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

I'm not an artist who has an agenda that's set by the work.

I think the most important thing is you need to have a very, very clear idea of who you are as an artist before you let other people tell you who you are.

The challenge is to balance the technical elements and what is required of us with being artists and telling a story.

For the serious artist does not satisfy needs

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.

All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object.

It is difficult to read the reviews when you start because you see something in your collection and the press sees something else. That is when you have to be very strong about your own style. They can say whatever they want, but I do what I do because I love it.

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

You have to remain strong. That's the kind of filmmaker I want to encourage. Orson Welles was the one who said, you know, you can learn anything you need to know about filmmaking- that's camera, sound, celluloid, video at this point- in four hours. It has nothing to do with anything. It has nothing to do with it... It has to do with what you want to say. If you feel you have something to say, you'll find that way to get it said, on film, and not let anyone or anything chip away at that or tarnish it, because it's something special and precious.

A true artist never portrays to please, but to show.

The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist.

Part of the difficulty in trying to be both an artist and a businessperson is this: You make a picture because you have seen something beyond price; then you are to turn and assign to your record of it a cash value. If the selling is not necessarily a contradiction of the truth in the picture, it is so close to being a contradiction—and the truth is always in shades of gray-that you are worn down by the threat.

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

The hallmark of an artist is generosity.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.

When an artist explains what he is doing, he usually has to do one of two things: either scrap what he has explained, or make his work fit in with the explanation.

Art should never be sociological; it has got to be timeless. It's got to be your vision and how you can represent the world you see.

The great artists do not seek their forms in the midst of the past, but take the deepest soundings they can of the genuine, profoundest of their age.

One of the things I love about doing things that are creative is that I feel like it's my right as an artist not to be affected by the reactions of those people that are going to hear my songs.

Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide now where he stands. The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.

I practice the artist's golden rule. I wouldn't want somebody telling me how to finish my painting, I'm not going to tell him how to finish his movie or how to shape his movie.

Vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery.

True artists scorn nothing.