Wayne Thiebaud Quotes

My work is about the world I live in. So, I sort of make a picture of my life or our lives. I'm always looking for something that is overlooked, so I need to constantly be aware of what's going on.

I think a lot of actors, comedians, musicians, artists are drawn to this world, because you're allowed to excavate whatever it is that you're struggling with, and hopefully turn it into art.

I mean it wasn't that they sat around thinking oh gosh I needed more choices in my grocery stores the way I had come to think about it as an American growing up.

I think I started writing because no one had ever told me you can write about the things you know in a musical. They don't have to come from some far off place.

I think we all see the world from our own little unique bubble.

The more you think about it, the more amazing the everyday world of human beings becomes: most of it doesn't actually exist at all.

The novelist ... must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all.

I think everything I do is based on my experience in the world in one way or another.

The kind of poetry I write, lyric poetry, I think is really concerned with intimacy, with mystery. That needn't be religious mystery, there are mysteries to do with everyday life.

I think my music is definitely country but it's got a little bit of that rock flair about it. I always try to find the things that everyday people deal with in their everyday lives and situations in the songs that I sing.

'If You Could Read My Mind' was written during the collapse of my marriage. It's a great song. No one has any gripes about it. I wondered what my wife and daughter might think. My daughter is the one who got me to correct 'The feelings that you lacked' to 'The feelings that we lacked'.

It seems there's just no room left for elegance in this paper-plate, blue-jean world. And I, for one, think it's a shame.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is.

Americans really don't know much about chess. But I think when I beat Spassky, that Americans will take a greater interest in chess. Americans like winners.

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.

I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.

I almost never start with an image. I start with a painting idea, an impulse, usually derived from my own world.

I just read an article about how young American males feel uncomfortable appearing naked in front of each other in locker rooms. That was never the case when I was young. We were naked in the Army all the time. And neither actor in Call Me by Your Name appears fully naked. I think there might have been clauses in their contracts that ensured there would be no nudity. When I wrote the script, there was plenty of nudity. But the English just had none of the same squeamishness about it.

Shamanism, on the other hand, is this world wide, since Paleolithic-times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the center piece of any model of the world that you build.

One could think of ways to defeat the censor. I could put up the answers on my Facebook page or website or Counterpunch. In today's world it's not easy to suppress information. Technology has helped us a great deal.

My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.

I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there's still time.

I think they should put pies on the fronts of trains, so that when they hit something it's at least a little bit funny.

Buying is more American than thinking, and I'm as American as they come.

I think as designers we realize design is a signal of intention, but it also has to occur within a world and we have to understand that world in order to imbue our designs with inherent intelligence.