Tim Crouch Quotes

In my own life, I share my home with works by artists like Elizabeth Murray, Martin Puryear, Jackie Windsor and so many others, whose creativity is clear and fresh and compelling; the works break through the usual, and they inspire creativity; they inspire responses and understanding.

A work of art can start you thinking about some aesthetic or philosophical problem; it can suggest some new method, some fresh approach to fiction.

You know what makes me teary? Goya. Goya makes me cry.

From childhood my mother had me examining Robert Mapplethorpe's style and Egon Schiele's framing - that's what modelling is about.

When people ask me what it is about Brazil and my work, it's not something that I can say literally. It's unidentifiable. It's like when you do research and things inspire you. If you're smart enough, then obviously you don't take it literally. The inspiration will come out later somehow.

Yes, influences are enriching, and they can be found in every work of art, even the most original.

I kind of write about visual art the way Roger Angell writes about baseball, which is to say, you're writing about life: it's a somewhat focused, limited terrain in which you write about everything.

Ksenia Sobchak as president is like Sergei Shnurov as an artist. It's satire. It's a very high-level art project.

Art is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words.

When I have used cartoon images, I've used them ironically to raise the question, 'Why would anyone want to do this with modern painting?'

My first black-on-black picture was 'The Portrait of an Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self.' I started using it as an emblem of this undercurrent of wickedness, malevolence, and irony - all of that.

Comedy can do so much more than make you laugh.

I've always said that musicians are the comics of my generations and comedians are the politicians of my generation.

Beauty and art pervade all the business of life like a kindly genius, brightly adorning our surroundings whether interior or exterior, mitigating the seriousness of existence and the complexities of the real life, extinguishing idleness in an entertaining fashion, and, where there is nothing good to be achieved, filling the place of vice better than vice itself.

In her enthusiasms she had always looked for something tangible: she had always loved church for its flowers, music for its romantic words, literature for its power to stir the passions and she rebelled before the mysteries of faith just as she grew ever more restive under discipline, which was antipathetic to her nature.

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.

Without painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and the emotions produced by natural beauty of every kind, life would lose half its charm.

Every artist learns through imitation, but I rather doubt the aim of these things is artistic development. I assume they're either homages or satiric riffs, and are not intended to be taken too seriously as works in their own right. Otherwise I should be talking to a copyright lawyer.

Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.

I'll write, because I'll give - You critics means to live; For should I not supply - The cause, the effect would die

You know, artists are influenced by other artists. We're all deeply influenced by what's around us; we don't make anything cold. Sometimes we think that we do. But within that, the most important part is that even though we're influenced, what are the levels of invention that we carry forth even as we've been influenced by something that's come before?

My work doesn't have the same rules as, say, Andy [Warhol]'s work. But it's gathered together for the simple reason that we all worked with the images and objects around us.

The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.

Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decides this? Does algebra move you to tears? Can plural possessives express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe!

...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?