Martin Amis Quotes

A fine artist is one who makes familiar things new and new things familiar.

You have to be able to observe life as if you were a camera all the time, constantly looking at light and the way that things are placed and the way people hold themselves. You need the ability to see something in someone or something that no one else really sees and be able to bring that to light. Basically, you have to be an obsessive crazy person.

I think the artistry is in having an insight into what one sees around them. Generally putting things together in a way no one else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who don't have that insight.

Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.

An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.

To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.

It should be one's sole endeavor to see everything afresh and create it anew.

Good films that get made are so few and far between. I want to write and direct more, but only so I can keep a fresh perspective.

The characteristic of 'Oxygene' is a mixture of innocence and ambition, of trying to do something different in a different way.

This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything- as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.

Photography doesn't teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.

I think my thing is that I try and pick up on things that other people have maybe not picked up on.

See what no one else sees. See what everyone chooses not to see... out of fear, conformity or laziness. See the whole world anew each day!

The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.

An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you. If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningness. If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.

I've no doubt that those photographs i took will make people look at everything in a more interesting way - the little tear on one piece of paper, the shadow on another. But good painting has always done that - made you see things. And the most ordinary can be the most extraordinary.

The effort to see things without distortion takes something like courage and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he saw it for the first time.

As for the outside world, the artist is confronted by what he sees; but what he sees is primarily what he looks at.

There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.

The artists must see all things as if he were seeing them for the first time. All his life he must see as he did when he was a child.

To be a writer you need to see things as they are, and to see things as they are you need a certain basic innocence.

My work isn't about form. It's about seeing. I'm excited about seeing things, and I'm interested in the way I think other people see things.