Charles Ray Quotes

I look at the artistic process as like experiencing the world, channeling it through your personality and sending it back out there. That's the process.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

I have all these revelations as I'm writing. Each song is like a chapter of my diary.

I try to make pictures I would want to see.

I've always had a creative urge and I get immense satisfaction from creating something because it feels like I'm making sense of the world and imposing order on it.

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

Which implies that the real issue in art is the audience's response. Now I claim that when I make things, I don't care about the audience's response, I'm making them for myself. But I'm making them for myself as audience, because I want to wake myself up.

Generally, I move in the direction of art.

I know that some people work differently, but I have to work from the inside out. It doesn't matter how big the character is, there has to be a truthful core.

When I make my music, I try and speak to me. I try to go back and hear it, so my music gets me through the times, you know what I'm saying?

I'm not really interested in myself in my writing. I can't see myself in the songs, even though I know different parts of me are there.

It's inevitable that if you write an album or a song, obviously it's going to come from how you feel. You're writing it for yourself, it's just the way it is.

I know what I do. I know what I put on film. I know what I try to do. I don't want to talk about what I've done.

When you're writing songs for yourself, as all artists do, it's about 'me.' It's about what you feel and your emotions. You're trying to get something out of your system about your experiences.

ART Art is that thing having to do only with itself—the product of a successful attempt to make a work of art. Unfortunately, there are no expamples of art, nor good reasons to think that it will ever exist. (Everything that has been made has been made with a purpose, teverything with an end exists outside of that thing, i.e., "I want to sell this", or "I want this to make me famous and loved", or "I want this to make me whole", or worse, "I want this to make others whole.") And yet we continue to write, paint, sculpt and compose. Is this foolish of us?

Writing is like paying myself a formal visit.

You are the accumulations of your experiences at any given point. And when you express something those things come out. The thing is I hate seeing my films when I'm done with them, so I don't look back as a chart of my life, but I leave it as a kind of chart. Though, it is a photograph, captured.

The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

It doesn't matter what it is, it doesn't matter if you have training or a background in it. Just create something, and lend a piece of yourself to that art.

Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.

Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world.

It's a shock for me to go through and see all those years of painting my life, which is very personal for me. It's a very difficult thing for an artist to look back at his work.

To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.