Diane Wakoski Quotes

As soon as any art is pursued with a view of money, then farewell, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, all hope of genuine good work.

I'd love to have written a film and it to be regarded as good. I'd just like to be doing things that are good, really. I think that's all you can aim for. I find it odd when actors say they just want to do films or plays or television. A lot of films aren't very good; a lot of television isn't very good; a lot of plays aren't very good.

I think I've matured to a great extent. I think that I want different things now. That it's not about the celebrity status that you receive because you're doing the next hot movie. It's about doing good work.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

I just want to make sure I'm contributing good films to movie history rather than being famous just to be famous.

I was living in London and I thought, 'There's nothing here for me anymore.' I don't want to become this actor who's going to be doing this occasional good work in the theater and then ever diminishing bad television. I thought I'd rather do bad movies than bad television because you get more money for it.

There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.

I'm just into making quality stuff if I can, with interesting people and good scripts. But it's very important that it's about something and that it says something. Otherwise, I don't know what the point is, really.

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible.

To me, it's about good work, a good story, and tastefully done. There's so many stigmas - oh, you're on the small screen or you do films or you do reality. It's about the project and not the medium on which it's delivered. It's the story you tell, period.

If no one wants to jump into a Kim Weston and drive it down the street. That's fine with me I don't care. I know my work is good and I know it's serious work.

I think that some of the writing, directing, and the content is better than a lot of movies sometimes. Actors, well artists in general - actors, writers, directors - what we all care about the most is good work and being able to create something that is really resonant and meaningful.

I don't think [price] reflects if the work is good or bad.A good artist shouldn't be nervous about that.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

Although I do not care for the slogan "art for art's sake", there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.

No art should be fashionable.

I am afraid that as evangelicals, we think that a work of art only has value if we reduce it to a tract.

The artist who is not also a craftsman is no good; but, alas, most of our artists are nothing else.

I just don't think it honors God to create mediocre art.

Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.

What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.

People are very uncomfortable when you call actors artists because there are a lot of actors out there that aren't artists - there are a lot of actors that are hired for very specific reasons that are shallow and have to do with sexual currency and what the industry thinks sells. Real actors are artists, they're expressionists.

Art can be very political but that can't be the purpose of art, it can't be the driving force. It isn't with any of the books that I love, anyway.

The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.