Tom Peters Quotes

Take Tom Sachs as an artist. His brain is more brilliant than anything, so of course, anything he puts out over a ten-year period is going to continue to be super relevant. But if you look at some artists, they have one good idea, but unless you know where it's coming from, it's not going to be lasting.

If art is any good, it has so much of a longer trajectory than one night. Contemporary art is separate from art openings. In the end, it depends on the strength of ideas in each piece.

'Upstream Color' in particular, it's got to infect culture at some level in order to have a life of its own. Then it'll be judged, and it'll either live or it won't by its own merit, and history will decide whether it's relevant however long into the future. I think that's more than enough to hope for.

I'm not going to have a perfect career. It's better to be Billy Wilder and make lots of movies and have five or six great ones than to make so few movies that when you make a bad one it crushes you.

What matters here are the works - finally without them his life would be uninteresting. What matters, that is, are the astonishing things that he left behind. If we can get the life in relation to the works, then it can take off.

And who cares, five years down the road, what most movies made or didn't make? If it's good, it stands up.

I do a lot of work that's permanent. The drawings, the sculptures, they're permanent.

Unfortunately, the Egyptians weren't the greatest artists in the world.

I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

Fairs are beneath the dignity of art. To stand there in a booth and hawk your wares - it is just not how you sell art.

The test of the artist does not lie in the will with which he goes to work, but in the excellence of the work he produces.

I would rather write or record something great and have it overlooked than do mediocre work and have it be popular.

What I'm most pleased about is that there's no particular decline. The songs I wrote 40 years ago are no worse and no better - there's a consistency.

If the goal is to get the best artists, actors, and filmmakers in the world to create the best movies, Hollywood does a decent job. And I think no one would disagree with me that it also makes a ton of bad movies and employs a bunch of hacks.

Hopefully, one day people will be able to look at Mumford & Sons and say, 'that's a career band.' It's all about time instead of sales.

There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you're going to write before you die.

A lot of people have come with 100 songs and never had the impact that I have with one, and I'm well aware of that.

What lists and awards don't measure - and I feel this strongly - is the lasting value of any work of art. They're a snapshot of a moment, and one should always consider their judgments in that context.

Great art - or good art - is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different.

There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Mir= and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.

Painting becomes interesting when it becomes timeless.

Do I belong in the conversation about the best artists in the world? My answer is yes, I do.

Fervor outweighs numbers.

As soon as any art is pursued with a view of money, then farewell, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, all hope of genuine good work.

A legacy is a lot of times determined by how people accept your music. And sometimes people's legacy starts late or starts early, or they last a long time or a short amount of time. As a musician, I've never taken an approach of wanting to try to control that because I don't think that I can.