Rodney Crowell Quotes

For instance, I may bring a certain feminist perspective to my songwriting, because that's how I see life. I'm interested in art, poetry, and music. As that kind of artist, I can do anything. I can say anything. It's about self-expression. It knows no package - there's no such thing. That's what being an artist is.

Giorgio Morandi's paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style.

I leave the genre labeling to other people. I really do. If I were to think too hard about it, that would stifle you creatively. If you think too hard about who other people want you to be as an artist, it stops you from being who you want to be as an artist.

An artist cannot be responsible for what people make of their art. An audience loathe giving up preconceived images of an artist.

I don't necessarily love all the collaborations that I've done; the more I work with other people, the more I realize that I want to work with myself.

I try not to spend too much time interpreting my comics for people, because I try to put out there whatever I can, and people can draw whatever conclusions they want.

I wasn't exactly sure where I wanted to take my music and how I wanted to be portrayed, and it was sort of, not done for me, but more directed.

I am not really interested in only showcasing my life or work but plan to produce, write and create work that is solely my vision.

I want to be my own artist and reflect my creativity.. I don't want to be turned into a pop princess; that's not who I am.

I went to art school, and I studied drawing and video art, and I've always approached music so visually as a result that I found it really difficult in the past to kind of hand off music to another director, 'cause it just ends up being this kind of mid-zone where it's nobody's vision, really.

I think people should just make art and let the art speak for itself.

One can't help but bring one's own personality into what one is doing, and it's certainly true of us actors and it's true of writers.

The artist and his work are not to be separated. The most willfully foolish man cannot stand aloof from his folly, but the deed and the doer together make ever one sober fact.

Music means freedom to me. But in acting you can pretend to be someone else and I like that.

I don't feel any obligation to make my intentions for a song accessible to a listener or an audience. I'm not interested in conveying anything to them so much as what's best for me.

My dream is to do whatever I want without any interference from the record company.

I had thrown my body in for art... I had thrown myself into this game for art. You know, I was not a very good artist. But this was, like, one thing I could do. (On being photographed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at Duchamp's 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art.)

Making art is complicated because the categories are always changing. You just have to make your own art, and whatever categories it falls into will come later.

A work of art is something produced by a person, but is not that person — it is of her, but is not her. It’s a reach, really — the artist is trying to inhabit, temporarily, a more compact, distilled, efficient, wittier, more true-seeing, precise version of herself — one that she can’t replicate in so-called ‘real’ life, no matter how hard she tries. That’s why she writes: to try and briefly be more than she truly is.

When the individuality of the artist begins to express itself, what the artist gains in the way of liberty he loses in the way of order.

Every personal experience of my life impacts my music. I can only give what I have. And when I receive, I give it back. I often fix it or color it differently or give it in my way, but thats what its about.

art is not advocacy and advocacy is not art.

Being a creative person. It's so much more rewarding when you find things on your own, to live whatever the writers are writing or to display what the director is looking for. You are the thing that everybody uses to get the story out.

I remember one day when Juan Gris told me about a bunch of grapes he had seen in a painting by Picasso. The next day these grapes appeared in a painting by Gris, this time in a bowl; and the day after, the bowl appeared in a painting by Picasso.

The artist can within limits make what he likes of his life... It is only the artist, and maybe the criminal, who can make his own.