Steve Martin Quotes

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

Music and language are a vital element. We, as actors and directors, offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves.

No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely.

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Whatever you do in life, there's content and form; only those two put together create special meaning of a great work of art or great interpretation of music or a great story that you tell.

Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.

When I first began choreographing, I never thought of it as choreography but as expressing feelings. Though every piece is different, they are all trying to get at certain things that are difficult to put into words. In the work, everything belongs to everything else - the music, the set, the movement and whatever is said.

Writers are lampposts and critics are dogs. Ask lampposts what they think about dogs. Does the dog hurt the lamppost?

I think art is communication. To that extent, it can be the words between the words. It has a possibility of communicating something more than people can do with prose or just talking.

Film is the only art form where we feel we have to title our stuff literally. Musicians don't have to title their songs literally. It can be more about what's conjured up when you think of a word.

Art after all is but an extension of language to the expression of sensations too subtle for words.

We have learned to whittle the Eden Tree to the shape of a surplice peg, We have learned to bottle our parents twain in the yelk of an addled egg. We know that the tail must wag the dog, for the horse is drawn by the cart, But the devil whoops, as he whooped of old; It's clever, but is it art?

It began in images and it ended in symbolism.

There's almost no content in terms of language at all. I don't like using language to convey meaning. I'd rather use images and music.

Verbal communication about music is impossible except among musicians.

If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist.

Music means freedom to me. But in acting you can pretend to be someone else and I like that.

Art does not imitate, but interpret. It searches out the idea lying dormant in the symbol, in order to present the symbol to men in such form as to enable them to penetrate through it to the idea. Were it otherwise, what would be the use or value of art?

The function of artists is "the mythologization of the world."

I suggested that it was not enough to add a moustache to the Mona Lisa: it should simply be destroyed.

They all trying to say something with music that you can't say with plain talk. There ain't really no words for love or pain. And the way I see it, only fools go around trying to talk their love or talk their pain. So the smart people make music and you can kinda hear about it without them saying anything.

As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language.

Drawing - it's the first language of human beings, before writing, before even talking, before words, human beings was drawing.

The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.

Before you go further, let me tell you what a poem brings, first, you must know the secret, there is no poem to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries.