Artistic Authenticity Quotes

If you consider yourself a part of the culture, then finances can't allow you to be bigger than the actual art form.

I tell myself I use art to promote dissent, but maybe I am just using dissent to promote my art. I plead not guilty to selling out. But I plead it from a bigger house than I used to live in.

I'm a worldly angel, meaning I've adjusted to the ways of the world, even though I am a child of God. I wouldn't consider myself a Christian rapper, but if we were Christian rappers, we would kill.

I'm not an industry artist - I'm an artist in the industry.

Ultimately, I don't think you can be a character who's completely alien or divorced from your own personality. It's probably true of every writer - it's probably true of every filmmaker, every songwriter - that, ultimately, every character you create is a facet of yourself.

The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality.

There's something very cool about that indie spirit that I try to hang on to even now with the bigger films that I'm working on.

Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?

If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.

Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain contempt for it, Moore said, you could find a place in it for the genuine.

That's just the way the world's going - everything has to be so instantly commercial that it kills anything that's a little bit underground instantly.

There is no purity with regards to the marketplace and art, I believe.

I believe that music is connected by human passions and curiosities rather than by marketing strategies.

Most female artists - to do what you have to do and to be as honest as you have to be, to be as selfish as you have to be, as tunnel-visioned as you have to be to make art, not entertainment - you can't compromise, really.

I had a style before I was signed, but now I'm developing my commercial sound as well as trying to strike a balance between authentic music and music that the masses will love.

I don't like painting flowers in my music. I like painting guts and pain.

I've always enjoyed feeling a connection to the avant-garde, such as Dada and surrealism and pop art. The only thing the artist can do is be honest with themselves and make the art they want to make. That's what I've always done.

Art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God.

Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals.

I'm not interested in doing something edgy with a capital E just so everyone knows, 'Oh, OK, now he's showing us he can do edgy.'

Drawing is the honesty of the art.

I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.

Whatever art form you're working in, it's crucial to see it clearly, to feel it clearly, and not to worry about the results, or how someone else will see it.

Through care taken over trends, the desire to be novel and affectation knowledge, we repudiate our art, our instinct, our own way of doing things; it is absurd and stupid

Most of my songs are about Jesus. Most of my songs are about the idea that there is salvation, and that there is a Savior. But I won't mention his name in a song just to get a cheap play.