Artistic Limitations Quotes

Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.

I cannot exist as a solo artist.

We can look you in the eye and talk to you about life, heart, love rock'n'roll, whatever, but we do not have the moral authority to tell people how to vote or what to do with their bodies. We are just a rock band.

There is a danger in becoming an icon, as people can see you as remote and untouchable, and they are less willing to tolerate you doing things that don't fit with their preconceived idea of you. Iconic status can be like a pair of handcuffs, especially if, like me, you wish to continually stretch yourself creatively, as Warhol did.

I'm a true believer that unless you're Prince or Stevie Wonder - and even Prince is showing that he needs help - not everybody can produce themselves. I'm definitely not that person.

I'm not ever going to - ever going to be able to put on chains and become the Migos.

Lenin is an artist who has worked men, as other artists have worked marble or metals. But men are harder than stone and less malleable than iron. There is no masterpiece. The artist has failed. The task was superior to his capacities.

Art can do much, but this maxim's most sure/A weak or wounded brain admits no cure.

Even the most deft pen is a clumsy tool.

The arts have a development which comes not only from the individual but also from a whole acquired force, the civilization which precedes us. One cannot do just anything. A talented artist cannot do whatever he pleases. If he only used his gifts, he would not exist. We are not the masters of what we produce. It is imposed on us.

The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail.

I general don't color my stuff - I'm pretty horrible with color. Usually, I'll get one of my cartoonist friends to help me out.

You can just start shooting things and see how it goes. But time is still money, so you have to know when you are finished. It's not like painting a picture which you could go on refining for 20 years - with a film you have to stop at some point, and that is no bad thing.

How can I make a movie about the violence of the police if the police aren't going to let me film it?

There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art.

Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can't be done.

Limited means often constitute the charm and force of primitive painting. Extension, on the contrary, leads the arts to decadence.

The biopic also wasn't a form that I necessarily believed in, because you can never really get it right, you know? It's also a form that's very popular - the straight-ahead biopic.

God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.

Every artist has limits. No one can do everything. It's impossible.

There are rules in movies. I did a movie playing a bad cop who was a heroin addict but they wouldn't let me smoke in a movie.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

I have no illusions of being the big box office draw. But I would like to have some choices.

Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.

I think a lot of rappers limit themselves by doing the gangster movies and that's stereotypical for a rapper.