Theodore Roosevelt Quotes

As an artist, program directors always want to put you in a little box.

It's a lot easier to say you're a comic than a performance artist.

We all name ourselves. We call ourselves artists. Nobody asks us. Nobody says you are or you aren't.

The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.

You know, we love to categorise or label everything in our lives: people, movies. But I think that those are just the decorations. They, of course, work. They're great, but that's not the thrust of the film.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

I think the term 'conceptual art' is a useful term for writers, a basket to put people in, like Pop Art or Impressionism or whatever.

success in L.A. is completely arbitrary. One day you're the brilliant genius of life, the next day people act like there's a bad smell when you approach. Lots of expensive, late-model cars are offered in the L.A. Times every day by people who have suddenly begun to smell bad. The stakes are just too high for human dignity.

I was...attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing "simple" music, blamed for deserting "modernism," accused of renouncing my "true Russian heritage." People who had never heard of, or cared about, the originals cried "sacrilege": "The classics are ours. Leave the classics alone." To them all my answer was and is the same: You "respect," but I love.

It's tough to make music and make it your own, and not have somebody call it something you don't agree with but can't control. Sometimes the press doesn't realize how much power they have and how they can shape somebody's life. I think there's a lot of people just trying to make music and get their art out there, and their heads get f**ked by the press calling them this or calling them that.

[Personal life] doesn't affect my creative process. It just gives me more subjects to talk about. Basically whatever you put in your music is how you want people to view you.

I do not paint nature. I am nature.

A piece of cloth that is called "linen" has more validity than calling you and me "black" or "negro." "Cotton" has more validity as cotton than yours and my being "black."

At first you're doing it for yourself, it's about what sounds good to you. It's about expressing yourself. Then you get comfortable as an artist and you find yourself and people get familiar.

There's only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive.

I have a suggestion for a new name for the developing world. Let's call it the world.

The material world will always attract a lot of women. A lot of people would be down for that, whatever the cost.

'Christian' used to be a throwaway word. People didn't used to use it much. People didn't start self-labeling or getting labeled Christian until the last part of the 20th century. Before that, you might identify as a Baptist, or a Southern Baptist or a Methodist. But there wasn't one identifier that put you in a fold with all the other believers.

I didn't become an impressionist. As long as I can remember I always have been one.

If you put a label on yourself, people will pigeonhole you.

When I'm traveling to promote my book, I feel like an artful impostor. What I really am is when I'm in my (painter's) studio and when I'm writing. With actors, it's the same thing. They're kind of artful impostors in public. When you get to know them, they're different people.

Cubism did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries; it was not developing abstraction towards its own goal, the expression of pure reality.

Don't create for the masses. Create for the people who are your kind of weird.

Why do you have to choose what type of woman you are? Why do you have to label yourself anything?

Many errors, of a truth, consist merely in the application of the wrong names of things.