Spike Lee Quotes

It's funny, growing up there was never anybody around me with any kind of artistic bent.

I grew up with artists.

I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example.

I think when you come from a house full of artists, everyone's got their niche.

I have been surrounded by artists and paintings throughout my life. My father Ted Dyer is an artist, and from a very early age I have spent time painting and drawing.

My father is a well known artist, Ted Dyer, who has been painting for many years. Our work is very different, but growing up surrounded by paintings, paints, easels and art books does have an effect.

When I was young, I remember feeling a real thirst for opportunities around the arts, for learning about how artists function and how institutions work.

When I moved to Chicago, I was coming from a school that didn't have any arts in Alabama. I essentially came from a town where the arts didn't exist and the desire for education didn't exist and wasn't valued.

I got to grow up in an incredibly artistic family.

The best gift I was ever given was the arts. My mum gave me those on a silver platter. Growing up, her and my grandmother would take me to ballets, classical concerts, even smoky jazz clubs I wasn't supposed to be in!

Two of my grandfathers had been artists, lifelong oil painters, so I was exposed to art very young. I've always been interested in it, although I never pursued it as a career or even as an avocation.

I was raised to be some kind of artist.

My mother was a high school arts teacher, so I was always surrounded by the arts.

I was exposed to the arts, but there was no one in my family who was an artist.

My father is a visual artist, so I was influenced by him, and my mother is an English teacher who forced me to read a lot of books and poetry and get involved in theatre. I developed a varied taste for different arts.

Ever since I was little, I was so infatuated with everything concerning the arts.

I've been lucky to have grown up in the arts.

I do love being amongst creative people and facilitating that and being inspired by people. I get very bored with just competence and require inspiration all around me.

An acquaintance with the muses, in the education of youth, contributes not a little to soften manners. It gives a delicate turn to the imagination and a polish to the mind.

I was fortunate because I had parents who believed that being a writer was a perfectly acceptable thing to want to be. They'd actually hoped that I might be an artist, and I was lucky again to grow up with people who delighted in making things: my father wove baskets and painted furniture and carved wood figures; my mother quilted and embroidered and sewed.

My mom was heavily in the arts; my entire family, they're all musicians and draw. They have much more artistic talent than me!

I really liked Quentin Blake, who did all of Roald Dahl's stuff. I don't think I really got Quentin Blake as a kid, but as I grew older, I really appreciated the kind of knowledge and the skill that went into those seemingly effortless drawings, and I really wanted to capture some of that in my own work.

Theater actually took time to pique my interest. It just wasn't a part of my upbringing. I don't have anyone in the arts in my family. I wasn't brought up particularly cultured. It was always TV and film for me.

My mother sent me to art classes at the age of 11. I began to have kids around me say, 'Will you make drawings for me? Will you make a painting for me?' And it really clicked.

It's weird: I don't really know where I pull my inspiration from. I think it's N.E.R.D.