James Frey Quotes

An artistic impression is substantially the resultant of two components. One what the work of art gives the onlooker - the other, what he is capable of giving to the work of art.

For me, all the materials and objects I employ come from a specific space that's very personal.

In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.

I'm not trying to spell out a story. I still think you feel the painting, and the reason you read the mark is because you also feel the mark.

I feel like we want to compartmentalise things and say, 'Well, that's emotional, artistic and subjective, while this is intellectual, objective and measured.' I have difficulty thinking that's the way we experience things.

I think it's always interesting how music means different things to different people, and people who overthink it are looking to in some ways show off with music, versus people who just respond to a song and decide to sing it.

Art is so subjective, and people can react however they want.

All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you.

People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.

The Cube was a wonder - a wonder for itself and a wonder for myself. To me, it was much more strange than to anybody else.

You finish a film not in the editing, but in the conversations that audiences have with themselves - and in that sense, every viewer is making a slightly different film. And that's wonderful.

Watching something is a personal experience, and I think watching something that is dealing with a heavy subject matter, it's a personal thing.

I can only be instinctive in my reaction to Shakespeare.

I believe all of us should have the freedom to have our personal take on how art affects us.

Obviously, something like ballet, you have music, you dance with the music and it's a very direct connection. With visual art, when there's no music that accompanies the art, such as great masterworks in a museum, you wind up interpreting what the artist is doing, how the artist made that work and what they're conveying.

The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.

Seeing a play, listening to music - you'll always contextualize it in your own way. Whoever you are, wherever you are; I think that's really important.

It's always dangerous to prescribe an idea on other people. I think people's interactions with art are their own, and will be far more interesting and sophisticated than anything that I could come up with.

In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you.

Beauty . . . cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.

One's roused by this, another finds that fit: Each loves the play for what he brings to it.

I think not knowing what to think of your paintings is a good place to be.

If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like "Goodness alive!" would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively.

To love a painting is to feel that this presence is ... not an object but a voice.