Artistic Confinement Quotes

The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.

The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art.

I don't want to be in an art bubble.

I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

I went mainstream in a major way with the song "Let's Dance." And what I found I had done was put a box around myself. It was very hard for people to see me as anything other than the person in the suit who did "Let's Dance," and it was driving me mad - because it took all my passion for experimenting away.

I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figurative or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars.

I have always disliked the idea of an arts ghetto in which poetry is kept on a life-support system.

As a journalist, I would talk to writers, directors, creative people, and discover that for an awful lot of them, the moment they became successful, that was all they were allowed to do. So you end up talking to the bestselling science-fiction author who wrote a historical-fiction novel that everybody loved, but no one would publish.

It's dangerous when music gets cornered by anything.

Oh, I am a lonely painter / I live in a box of paints.

People expect things from art that are horrible for us who make it! They put the things we make in these restrictive places called 'museums,' then don't want to hear another word from us.

We are most artistically caged.

I could never work in a recording studio where you have this lovely view and a beach and the waves are crashing. For me, it's all about being in a tiny room with little windows. It's almost like you have to be in a prison. And you can create beauty when you're in that sort of deprived environment, which is a re-creation of your formative years.

With our first two records we backed ourselves into a hole musically.

We live in a world where art exists in galleries and museums, and musicians have to play the same venues over and over.

Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do.