Artistic Discomfort Quotes

What I really mean is that actors do the interview process because they have to. It's a good bargain: If I can do this part then I'll sell it. I just wish it wasn't me who had to do it because it feels very unnatural.

At the end of OK Computer we were playing big, big arenas and it wasn't right. You can do those things occasionally but at the time it didn't feel right.

Working on films where the money's more important than the creativity, I just get a bit freaked out by that. I just don't feel comfortable.

Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?

I love Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke, but if I'm not in the right frame of mind to watch their work, I feel upset after watching it.

I am a graphic artist heart and soul, though I find the term artist rather embarrassing.

Poetry makes people nervous. Especially in schools.

I have been singing as long as I can remember. I used to be in choir; I used to do musical theater. I'd prefer not to sing my own songs, but there you have it.

I pay my models to work with me, so there becomes this weird sort of economic bartering thing, which made me feel really sort of uncomfortable, almost as though you were buying into a situation - which, again, is another way of looking at those paintings. The body language in those paintings is a lot more stiff.

I do think that we all draw limits and I feel like part of the work of an artist is it shouldn't be fun. This shouldn't be comfortable. I'm not looking to make people feel unsafe, but I am looking to make people feel uncomfortable.

It was always acting, singing and dancing that I loved. Not the horror of performing on the piano in front of an assembled audience of quiet people. I'd forget the piece just before I went out to do the concerto, the panic was too great . This was not anything that gave me pleasure. This was fulfilling somebody else's dream.

There are lots of parts of filmmaking that I don't like. At the end of the day, especially on features, the film turns into a commodity. You have to play this entirely new game I'm very uncomfortable with.

I sort of have open invitations from a lot of people to do TV. But it's very hard for me to do roles in sitcoms and movies because I'm not a great actor, so if the material isn't good, I'm in torment while I do it.

I always feel that art in general and acting in particular should make the audience a little uncomfortable, to slap them and wake them up.

I was a theater major, and I remember being in college, and whenever my professor would assign me songs that I hated, I really had a hard time singing them. One time, I even faked sick so I wouldn't have to sing a song.

At Cornell, my acting teacher said you cannot be religious and be an artist. I sort of got it, because faith is a comfort and art comes from a lot of places, in a lot of people, from the dark chasm.

The nice thing about movies is that you can sort of steer your audience toward seeing that there's discomfort, but there's also this sense of, 'Well, we'll tolerate this weirdness because maybe it'll be interesting.'

America tends to worship the modest talent because it doesn't put us in an uncomfortable position vis-a-vis the artist.