Jenny Holzer Quotes

I had a lot of songs and words and scenes stuck inside of me. So Jacknife encouraged me to bring them all out. So, in essence, 'You and Others' is my diary.

Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.

I think it's important I stay connected to every part of my personality. I play basketball. I rock climb. I paint. I'm a little bit scattered, but it's so I can convincingly play all these characters.

You see Michelangelo and Picasso and you read literature. I had some innate inchoate yearning for that, but I never really saw where I would fit in. That's called art. And then something happened to pop music, which is that it became art under the hand of the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan and some other people.

I'm a painter. I was a graffiti artist, and I painted all over the world.

Art was always for me an escape and a way to relate to the world around me.

The art of transformation is a very important thing to me, and I always believe I can say something more truthful through characters that are further away from me.

I felt the need to get back to painting and I thought the best way was to start drawing, so I enrolled in a life drawing class. I soon discovered that people made very interesting subjects and I am still surprised that I had never discovered it before.

Acting was a way of me finding myself, which I think is the case of a lot of actors, regardless of where they come from.

If it has something of substance and a platform that makes sense, I can share my story. You can get a little more into my life, and I can mesh my singing with things I love to do and writing for others and telling my story in hopes of helping someone. I'm all for it.

It is said an artist spends their whole life trying to get to the place where their heart was first opened up. 'Rent' was that place for me.

I like to paint and spend a lot of time doing art. For me, it's about hearing yourself and putting it out there as art. It's like a therapy thing.

I think music made me who I am. Music taught me what was gutter and what wasn't. Music taught me how to live.

My passion for painting is so sacred and personal to me.

As I showed the world my art, my heart, I wasn't just an actress. I was actually an artist. And that was my transformation.

Until I discovered hip-hop, I felt I wasn't going to accomplish anything.

When you're young and starting out, a lot of artists think they know exactly who they are. There are others who come out in someone else's skin. They learn to take it off bit-by-bit and work out the core of what they're trying to say.

I've always written poetry but I didn't realise it was a therapy for me until I was maybe 15. That's when my singing started to come together as well because I was listening to so much jazz. What I love I will always embrace.

I feel like I spent so much time trying to understand my identity and my identity as an artist. But when all is said and done, at this age, I feel the most like I felt when I was 11. And all those talents I had when I was 11 and 12 - I'm letting them sort of happen again. I can't speak for men, but for women - we go back to a kind of pre-adolescent state when we were superfree and supercool.

I think everybody should act! I would encourage everybody to do one thing, join a theater class or something. It's so good to take a character that you think is wildly different from who you are, and to try to relate to that person and become that person is very helpful. It's hard to articulate what you learn, but you can feel the effect of these characters that you play and take with you.

I am what I am again: a writer. I have metabolized the injury into art.

I truly find such a sense of peace and calm when I'm working, and it's an inner peace that I've never been ever to achieve, doing anything else. It's where I feel most myself. I can access my power and strength, as an artist, and I can't imagine not doing it. I love it!

I don't want to analyze myself or anything, but I think, in fact I know this to be true, that I enter the world through what I write. I grew up believing, and continue to believe, that I am a screw-up, that growing up with my family and friends, I had nothing to offer in any conversation. But when I started writing, suddenly there was something that I brought to the party that was at a high-enough level.

You get caught up in a cycle at some point, so I broke the cycle and decided; I'm going to really write a lot of books, because I need to get in touch with that part of myself in order to make more music.

I wanted to be a painter and an artist. And it's interesting that in some of my later musical works, I refer so often and associate myself with works of art.