Artistic Material Quotes

You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do.

Defeat furnishes good material to the poets and the artists, but none of us care to have the glory of the conquered apply to us.

When you're an actor or any kind of artist, you use your life as something to draw from in every experience.

I don't think there's anything really wrong with influence because I think that one can use another man's art as material either literally or just implying that they're doing that, without it representing a lack of a point of view.

All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

Anything is good painting material once you get to know it.

And for me there's still more material than 20 lifetimes that I can use up.

To make your life a work of art, you must have the material to work with. The race, any race, is just such an experience.

I never regret things. It's a really dangerous thing to say, but for anyone involved in the arts, the bad things that happen make for good material. It's not a comfortable truth, but it is true.

What all of us artists are doing is using our pain as material to create our work.

Honestly, I feel like I spent the last 10 years just trying to work, just get my hands on the best material I could. I'd like to say that it was quite calculated and genius, my ability to take one step forward and two steps back.

Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.

I'm actually living my life with the material I choose to work with.

Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.

Paint with whatever material you please - with pipes, postage stamps, postcards or playing cards, painted paper, or newspapers.

Bad things don't happen to writers; it's all material.

The performance is created by the director. The actor is the material. And I think that has to be true.

Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.

The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.

To work on great material, what you really end up working on is yourself, your own humanity.

I make it a habit of never trying to judge what an audience might think, only because all points of view are too close, because we're doing it every day, I think that the actor's point of view is sometimes too close to what the material actually is.

I am an artist, and I understand the pros and cons of being an artist, and the pressures of being an artist, and how much being an artist can be torture to people around you; you know, you friends and your family and how material you can be, and how it's hard to take criticism and all the things like that.

Our culture now wonderfully, alchemically transforms images and history into artistic material. The possibilities seem endless and wide open.

It would be bypassing the issue to say that the artist's business is to work with this and that material or manipulate the findings of perceptual psychology, and that the rest should be left to other professions.