Lukas Foss Quotes

No matter how many times people say it - 'Oh, I'm just writing this for myself' 'Oh, I'm just doing this for myself' - nobody's doing it for themselves! You're doing it for an audience. So whether I'm performing or writing a book or playing music, it's definitely to be put out there and to be received in some way, definitely.

I don't write to put it in a drawer, I hope that people see it.

I really sing songs that move me. I'm not in show business. I'm in the communications business. That's what it's for me.

You've got to write for your audience.

Words should be employed as the means, not the end; language is the instrument, conviction is the work.

An actor works with their soul and their thought.

For me, until I know that the audience really gets what I'm trying to communicate I'm not done.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.

I write to be read. I'm quite direct about that. I'm not writing to thrill colleagues or to impress the professors at the University of Iowa; that's not my goal.

Technology must remain a tool. It's a great tool, but technology is the pen to write the book. It's not the book. If you have a great pen, maybe you'll write faster or it will look better, but at the end, you have something to say, or you don't.

I kind of roll my eyes when people say they make music for themselves or they make art just for themselves, because, maybe in their head, what that means is that they're making it for someone who they don't think is real. Their audience isn't real. But it's still a communicative act. It's still an outward manifestation of longing.

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.

I'm so language-based and I'm so about communicating, and my art has always been very audience-based, and very about being functional and communicating something, and about feeling like I have to be heard.

I didn't write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say.

I want to communicate. I do; every artist does. That's why you're an artist.

It reset and mended my freshly damaged and distorted view of life, and made me recognize that this thing we call music, this primal expression that we reshape and refine and define ourselves with, is the gift I was given. The ability to communicate what others feel but cannot fully express, the passing down and around of songs and stories, from Pete Townshend to Joey Ramone to me, to the audiences who take the time and effort to support our work and give us a way to support ourselves -- I'm thinking this is what I am supposed to be doing.

What I am after, above all, is expression.

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

Which, then, brings us closer to what we want to communicate: saying what we intend, or trying to say the opposite?

Men are born to write. The gardener saves every slip, and seed, and peach-stone: his vocation is to be a planter of plants. Not less does the writer attend his affair. Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him as a model, and sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense that they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes that all that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it.

Art is the perpetual motion of illusion. The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for any one but inspire them?

Literally, I see my writing as transcription - a transcription of what I see, hear, think, live.

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.