James Vincent McMorrow Quotes

The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.

You can't be minimalist as a director until you have acquired the experience and confidence to say no.

I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.

Get to the point where the songs sum it all up, and creatively, I'm just like, 'This is it.' I've also learned how to be patient and not really try to overproduce anymore. I used to add instruments, keep adding instruments, but nowadays - I know better now. I know how to let the track breathe.

Do not try to paint the grandiose thing. Paint the commonplace so that it will be distinguished.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

What's completely insane to me is that people would consider music that's simple to be dumbed-down. Couldn't simplicity be a deliberate, smart choice?

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.

Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they're trying to say with jazz. You don't need any prologues, you just play.

I'm interested in directing attention and focus, explored through playing cello.

The whole essence of good drawing - and of good thinking, perhaps - is to work a subject down to the simplest form possible and still have it believable for what it is meant to be.

Creativity has more to do with the elimination of the inessential than with inventing something new.

I write my songs and just play them, so there are not a whole lot of fireworks. As long as the music comes first, it's OK to have some fireworks. But not the other way around.

Simplicity is natures first step, and the last of art.

All my wire sculptures come from the same loop. And there's only one way to do it. The idea is to do it simply, and you end up with a shape.

Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

No, I'm a flirtatious person; I'll flirt all day long, but it really is hard to get into that when I'm so into the music, and I'm in the studio all day long and all night sometimes. That's not an exaggeration.

I just play music, you know what I mean? That's what I want to spend my time talking about.

I could do beats with a million sounds, and I could do beats with two sounds. Which one is going to make the most sense, and which one is going to sell the most records? Most of the time, it's the simplicity.

I want to make music and that's it.

It's amazing to me how often the answer to making something sound better is to play something less.

Music is where I'm still. It's where I'm focused. It's such a joy. I'd like to make it a big part of my life.

We are unique because we're the same three guys, and as Billy says, playing the same three chords.

We always just go out there and do what we do. That's the way we approach all of our records.