David Oyelowo Quotes

But I'm the only one who can paint the moon, because I'm the only one who knows whether that's right or not.

Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That's the thing about painting, photography, cinema.

Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed

In the media, a reviewer has his personal vision but it's passed along to a million readers or whatever. He might think that this particular song sounds like Jo Blow. Or like a Bo Diddley record that he heard six years ago. But the artist who made the record may never have even heard the Bo Diddley song. We all respond differently.

It is the heart that makes the critic, not the nose.

I am an artist, and, through my eye, must confess to a tremendous bias. In my purely literary voyages my eye is always my compass.

It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.

My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of facts; my book is more like a collection of Ready-mades.

I do not photograph nature. I photograph my visions.

I do not think that my films or films by any other filmmaker represent "THE TRUTH." I do not feel the need to categorize my films or anyone else's.

The role of the painter . . . is to project that which sees itself in him.

Much of appreciating art or music is really the interpretation of the listener. To a certain extent it's projection - it's what people need or lack in themselves that they then put upon these people that they admire.

I see no difference between my pictures that people consider amusing and the rest. To me, it's all serious work - they're just a reaction to what I see. I don't leave this apartment in the morning and say to myself 'Today I'm going to be funny and tomorrow I'm going to be sad.'

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

I just want to make a beautiful film. I've had it in my head for so long, so I want to try. Every now and again I get scared. And that's not really how I operate in songwriting or as Sia the artist, the singer. I don't operate from a place of fear. But this is such a new area for me. I still have some insecurity. So, like, once a week I get washed from the top of my skull down to my toes with this vomitous feeling of fear. I think, "Just don't do it. You don't have to do it. You're already a singer and a songwriter. Really, you don't have to make a movie.".

Critics should help people see for themselves; they should never try to define things, or impose their own explanations, though I admit that if... a critic's explanations serve to increase the general obscurity, that's all to the good.

If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.

The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.

The beauty of ideas is that they are like waves in the ocean and they connect with things that came before them, and I think it is very important to embrace things that interest you and influence you, and incorporate them into what you do, as all artists have always done. The ones that say they don’t, are lying. Or are afraid that their work won’t be seen as being original, somehow.

An artist, if he is truly an artist, is only interested in one thing and that is to wake up the minds of men, to have mankind and womankind realize that there is something greater than what we see on the surface.

When you're an artist, you have a platform that can reach millions.

I have to create an object which resembles the tree. The sign for a tree, and not the sign that other artists may have found for the tree.

I cannot understand why the poets of our day wax indignant at the vulgarity of their age and complain of having come into the world too early or too late. I believe that every man of intellect can create his own beautiful fable of life.

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

I embrace the abstract in photography and exist on a few bits of order extracted from the chaos of reality.