Natasha Trethewey Quotes

I recognize very much in Hopper that it does look like the United States; it looks like the 30's and my first impressions of everything, all of which I have to deal with and which gets mixed up in my work and probably gets mixed up in everybody else's work too.

The passion for the past is clearly about more than market forces or government policies. History responds to a variety of needs, from greater understanding of ourselves and our world to answers about what to do.

I don't think that my work is actually effectively dealing with history. I think of my work as subsumed by history or consumed by history.

What kind of art do I want to make? What do I stand for? What inspires me? And then to have people in return respond to that... I think that's the greatest thing because throughout dancing, I'm always looking for that.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

We want people to experience art and think about it. The art reflects our time, it is about our culture.

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

In any art, you don't know in advance what you want to say - it's revealed to you as you say it. That's the difference between art and illustration.

To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.

What most people know about me, they know through my music. This time, I've tried to open that door as wide as possible. These songs are a giant step closer to who I really am and what my music is all about. Hence the title.

Art is the window to man's soul. Without it, he would never be able to see beyond his immediate world; nor could the world see the man within.

We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.

Understanding history means knowing what motivates you.

If we talk about art in general... all the works of art, each one of them could reflect a moment in the history of mankind, the time in which it was created.

Art is a direct reflection of the life you live. What you experience comes out in your work.

Only by painting the great panorama of history, can the great history-reading public be entertained or satisfied.

I've never been a representational artist at all. Most artists have been representational. That's when you discover yourself.

I'm not an artist. An artist makes an object. Me, it's not an object, I work in history, I'm a storyteller.

History after all is the true poetry.

Photographs are not ideas. They give us ideas.

Music, art, writing - it gives us a sense of who we are, a sense of our history, a sense of our future and it should provide some kind of comfort. It's not just entertainment for entertainment's sake, it's an investment.

It's History that's caused all the troubles in the past.

Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.