David Foster Wallace Quotes

Batty as it sounds, subject and style may choose artists, through some unfathomable cosmic means. How else to explain that even artists who enjoy what they do can be perplexed or even horrified that they're doing it?

One of my main decisions when accepting the job of Children's Laureate was that I must continue working on picture books. If I don't write and illustrate for some time, then I begin to question who I am.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

I never really thought of myself as a musician. I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way, it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

Although my art work was heavily informed by my design work on a formal and visual level, as regards meaning and content the two practices parted ways.

The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time.

I've often used the extremes in my work to comment on the mainstream. I think that sometimes a subject that I'm working on, like popular culture, is so present all around us that they're hard to see. It's like: How do you see the air you breathe? How do you see how it affects you?

I think you always, as an artist, feel like you would like to be more and more specific about your intent and your interests.

To be a truly conscientious artist, you have to look at what's not working and challenge it. You riff on things.

I think there are a lot of pictures to make. I sometimes question whether I'm even an artist or just a painter. To me, the making of the pictures is the most important thing.

Why do we make records? Because we want to say something. Why are you in art? Because you want to say something. The second you don't have anything to say, you stop making art - you might start making product. And I'm interested in being an artist.

Artists are political in the sense that they've subtracted themselves from the structure of the marketplace and are contributing something that's not utilitarian. Even though books get sold, and I get advances, I get to look at society and think for a living.

As a political artist, I think you have to learn how to create art, no matter what your ideology is.

Everything we do is art, philosophy, mysticism, cultural commentary.

In any piece of art, the artist pours themselves into it. It becomes a reflection of who they are and what they believe. That's what it has to be. Otherwise it's just a product.

Any form of art is political if you make it that way.

Looking at younger artists, like Varda Caivano and Kerstin Bratsch, I see that their work has something in common that is new to my generation. There's an effort to value the evidence of the hand and the handmade thing while also acknowledging the way in which the making of things with hands has such a complex, alienated place in our culture.

I consider myself first of all an artist. My work is about my creativity - why I create and not for whom.

Definitely in everything I do, the comic is a part of it.

When I write lyrics for Priest, I'm writing them for Priest. I'm not writing them for me.

I don't know if I would describe myself as a political artist.

My art in my head just needs to come out for me - for my legacy and who I am.

... a canvas that I have covered is worth more than a blank canvas. My pretensions go no further; that is my right to paint, my reason for painting.

Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.