Munira Mirza Quotes

When I first started coming to New York in the early Nineties and seeing the vitality of the programme compared to what was going on back in London or Paris, it was just in a different league. It's like a 16th-century court.

New York is so serious about the creation of work. Everything is happening so fast, it feels like there's another studio, another session on every block, and I love that.

The very beginning of European aesthetics started from Florence. Everything here was beauty, money, and creativity, the power of the good money.

I think Berlin is always inspiring. I love being in Berlin. It feels like such a cool city, with so much culture and art and independence everywhere.

London is full of creative people - you can never say that it's not.

The Futurists believed in the machine, in making a great big fuss, in being young. For a brief moment, they were arguably the most influential aesthetic provocateurs in the world.

In the large cities that received new Americans, there flowered a golden age of restaurants, manned by the available talent from abroad and fueled by the restless wealth of the newly rich.

Maybe the way we have learned to look has changed in the last 25 years, and the exotic is much more acceptable. There are many artists now, younger artists, who work out of the exotic.

New York is full of creative people, not only in fashion.

As a New Yorker you can't help but be proud of the fact that so much music and culture started here. Punk rock, jazz, hip-hop and house music started here, George Gershwin debuted 'Rhapsody in Blue' here; the Velvet Underground are from New York.

To be in Florence is to reflect on Europe's intricate diversity - and its lost creativity.

I think you learn a lot about a country from its art. To me, it's part of the drama of life. It teaches you that there are places, moments and incidents in other cultures that genuinely have a life of their own.

Today we're dealing with metropolitan Shanghai, metropolitan New Delhi or Paris. If we're competing at that level, our diversity, that richness of people coming from so many different backgrounds, is one of our greatest advantages.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.

You will find in the streets of New York every variety of architecture, just as you find in its libraries all the literatures of the world, and in its theatres all the music, and in its houses all the decorative arts.

Like the tangled veins of cypress roots that meander this way and that in the swamp, everything in New Orleans is interrelated, wrapped around itself in ways that aren't always obvious.

I had never watched a live classical performance before I came to Bengaluru. I feel like this is the New York of India - a melting pot of many cultures.

Modernism was born in part out of the need to find fresh ways of expression, to describe a new world that was unlike anything that had gone before.

New York City is still the art capital - every time I'm in New York, I'm thinking about competition.

It seems to me that the arts are rather flourishing. There's an awful lot of bad art about because of this, but that's true of every great era. I'm sure there was a lot dreadful art in the Renaissance that we fortunately don't see today.

Berlin is the place to which I am most closely bound by human and scientific ties.

I think all artists are looking for a subject or are sometimes unsure of their subject, but immigrant artists bring another culture to that and they bring also the place where the original culture meets the new culture.

I think there's some great stuff coming. I do feel that. I think we have reached our Harlem Renaissance.

It may sound weird, but I don't really look for culture, particularly in an American city.