It's an embarrassment of riches because you have directors who don't better. You end up with so much stuff going on the screen that you don't know where to look, and that's what I consider self-indulgent.
Our music is an answer to the early Seventies when artsy people with big egos would do vocal harmonies and play long guitar solos and get called geniuses.
I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.
Mars Volta was always about embracing what 'too much' was and the excess of it. I never thought there would be an audience for it.
Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that has art in it.
It is not reasonable that art should win the place of honor over our great and powerful mother Nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by our inventions that we have quite smothered her.
Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor.
One didn't really believe till one saw it demonstrated that giving oneself up completely to art, to emotion, to enjoyment, without planning for the future or counting the cost, produced dreadful disabilities and bankruptcies later.
Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.
Beethoven was always too much. He's not slightly anything - he's very everything.
Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique.
The climax of absurdity to which art may be carried when led away from nature by fashion, may be best seen in the works of Boucher.
You never find virtuosity for its own sake.
Let not the author eat up the man, so that he shall be all balcony and no house.
I really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than Paris, or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos anywhere.
Just because we can shoot something that looks like a movie doesn't mean we should. Sometimes if something looks too good, it's not funny. Some things need to look good, because we think it's funny that you'd spend so much time and be so precious about such a stupid idea.
The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
In opera, there is always too much singing.
Balance is the enemy of art.
Doing a movie is like eating five hundred canapes at a cocktail party - you're never really full. You don't feel as though you've eaten a meal, and yet you can't eat any more.
Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.
Never give an artist like me carte blanche: he would think it's simply toilet paper.
In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable.
