Greil Marcus Quotes

I don't believe that artists really are interested in money. That's not the motivation for art.

Just do exactly what it is that makes you want to do what you do. The stuff I listen to in my private collection, it's what moves me, makes me want to play. I want to make other people feel like I feel when I listen to that music. Whether other people like it or criticize it - even if there's only 10 people on the planet that love it, you're touching 10 people that way.

Picasso says that an artists paints not to ask a question but because he has found something and he wants to share—he cannot help it—what he has found.

It is the specialist's task to talk about means, about centimeters. An artist's task is to talk about the goal, about kilometers, thousands of kilometers. The organizing role of art consists of infecting the reader, of arousing him with pathos or irony -- the cathode and anode in literature. But irony that is measured in centimeters is pathetic, and centimeter-sized pathos is ridiculous. No one can be carried away by it. To stir the reader, the artist must speak not of means but of ends, of the great goal toward which mankind is moving.

An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond... a good feeling about his art.

Art is why I get up in the morning, but my definition ends there.

How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material.

I cannot say why I wanted to paint. The only answer is in the pictures themselves.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

What do you say when someone has truly inspired you? How do you express to an artist how deeply their work has affected you?

An artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his work wouldn't exist, for the artist doesn't live in a vacuum. Some sort of pressure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn't look for harmony but would simply live in it.

My approach is so simple; every song I sing, every story I tell, every move I make, must move the audience to laughter, tears, or inspiration. Otherwise, why do it? It's the communication.

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

When I make art, I think about its ability to connect with others, to bring them into the process.

I think it's the pain and suffering that drive you to become an artist. The art itself should be the pain, sort of exorcising every demon and making you feel like you're a person that matters.

'Hatful of Hollow' and 'The Smiths' were lent to me, and they made me want to create music that might make another person feel like they made me feel - to have an effect on someone.

There are two kinds of artists in this world; those that work because the spirit is in them, and they cannot be silent if they would, and those that speak from a conscientious desire to make apparent to others the beauty that has awakened their own admiration.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

One's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes.

For me to get up and feel the urge to go to the set and all that, I have to feel there is something tremendously vibrating to achieve there. I need to lose sometimes a consciousness of the person and the reality in order to be happy to come back into the reality and happier to live it for this cause, to be an artist in this life.

People have cried at a couple of shows. To think that someone could do that for me... Jesus Christ. That's a crazy sign.

I get inspired by the sounds that evoke an emotion from me. That's what I am drawn to; that's what turns me on.

I stood in front of a mountain and was overwhelmed by the beauty and energy; I had goosebumps. I thought, if I could record this feeling, go back home and pour it out again so other people can have that feeling, this I would want to be my work. I knew it was acting - I wanted to be like a messenger or medium.

The reason I make music is to make people feel something, anything.

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.