Gil Scott-Heron Quotes

I don't mean it egotistically, but I've been given the chance to be in front of people and sing, and I feel that it's part of my job and my duty - especially where I'm from - to speak the language of the people I'm around and speak for them.

I've always been drawn to artists who paint for the everyday person. I love the American illustrators.

Artists in Uniform

Not too many people draw black people as well as I do.

I paint American people, and I tell American stories through the paintings I create.

I believe that the problem of how you depict something is a formal problem. It's an interesting one and it's a permanent one; there's no solution to it. There are a thousand and one ways you can go about it. There's no set rule.

Being an artist is a way of saying, I am here, and this is what I stand for.

Artists are better at finding a way to kill their time.

As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for this other imagination of community - not the one showing up in the market. Nobody was tending to the way we're imaginatively connected to each other.

The photography is not the aim of the work; the articulation of the work through photography is another way of understanding what's going on and what's happening outside.

Intellectuals say simple things in difficult ways. Artists say difficult things in simple ways.

Don't be afraid to say what you don't know, and speak for what you do know. Say, "I can't speak for all Latinas, but I can speak for me and tell you very, very honestly."

When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew, Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend. When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

I want to talk about things that are tangible and real to me, but I also want to do them in a way that's poetic and artistic.

Diversity is so important for me, particularly in the United States Senate, and it's been important to every job that I've held. Whether you're in government or the private sector, we should be just as diverse as the community that we represent.

Your poems are rather hard to understand, whereas your paintings are so easy. Easy? Of course - you paint flowers and girls and sunsets; things that everybody understands. I never met him. Who? Everybody. Did you ever hear of nonrepresentational painting? I am. Pardon me? I am a painter, and painting is nonrepresentational. Not all painting. No: housepainting is representational. And what does a housepainter represent? Ten dollars an hour. In other words, you don't want to be serious - It takes two to be serious.

There is something abominable about cameras, because they possess the power to invent many worlds. As an artist who has been lost in this wilderness of mechanical reproduction for many years, I do not know which world to start with. I have seen fellow artists driven to the point of frenzy by photography.

If anybody reads an Indian newspaper, all these things are obvious, and so I am not breaking news. All I am doing is representing my community as it actually is. Also, I have to assume that readers are sophisticated enough to know that not every person in a community is the same, and so there are many people who would not force an abortion just because a fetus is female. Even within my stories, people hold opposing views.

In general, I think the best thing to do is to connect with other females. I love meeting other female artists and feeling like we're all rooting for each other. I think that's shifted even more.

Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves.

In earlier times artists liked to show what was actually visible... nowadays we are concerned with reality, rather than the merely visible.

In the tradition of the classic songwriter rooms like The Bluebird in Nashville, Strange Brew is a gift to the music community in Austin, for artists and audiences alike

The artist is the lowest form of life on the rung of the ladder. The publishers are usually businessmen who deal with businessmen. They deal with promotional people. They deal with financial people. They deal with accountants. They deal with people who work on higher levels. They deal with tax people, but have absolutely no interest in artists, in individual artists, especially very young artists.

We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn´e: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.

What Degas called 'a way of seeing' must consequently bear a wide enough interpretation to include way of being, power, knowledge, and will.