Artistic Renewal Quotes

I lived in a cabin in the woods in Oregon, and I'd basically given up on the music industry for an indefinite amount of time. And while I was out there, I came up with a very specific vision of what I wanted my music to sound like.

Every artist will one day face the moment when he or she is doing what he or she does after the style has passed and the art-world heat-seeking machine has moved on.

When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author -- then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.

Since the Gothic, European sculpture has become overgrown with moss, weeds - all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape. It has been Brancusi's special mission to get rid of this overgrowth and to make us once more shape-conscious.

Opera needs a major makeover; the large opera houses are too in thrall to their conservative patrons.

In Spring! In the creation of art it must be as it is in Spring!

'The Outsider' is a culmination of a lot of things I've been working diligently toward as a recording artist. Hopefully it will render my past pigeonholing obsolete while positioning me more solidly as a socially conscious American singer/songwriter. Wouldn't that be entertaining?

Ultimately, I really like to rap, and seeing what I can do to keep it fresh for myself has lent itself to tailoring over time.

New voices in an old art - and women poets have been that for much more than a century - do not diminish the art through the category. They enrich it. They renew it with common quandaries of craft and innovation. The category simply allows the quandaries to be seen more clearly.

poetry is where the language is renewed.

I started writing 'Leaves Of Grass' when my professional life was falling apart somewhat. I just had a movie implode in pre-production. And so I came back licking my wounds to New York, where I live, and started to write a script about a protagonist for whom the exact same thing happened: His life was falling apart.

I hope I'm beginning a new cycle of energy and creativity. If so, it'll really be my third career. The first was as a straight comic in the Sixties. The second was as a counterculture performer in the Seventies. The third will be...well, that's for others to judge.

You have to go away to come back. That's just normal. That's with bands, actors, comedians, everything.

Art has to keep moving and discovering to stay alive.

Music in general is looking for something new overall.

Around 1980, I went back to painting with a vengeance.

[After Easy Rider] I couldn't get another movie, so I lived in Mexico City for a couple of years. I lived in Paris for a couple of years. I didn't take any photographs, and then I went to Japan and saw a Nikon used. I bought it, and I just started, like an alcoholic. I shot 300 rolls of film. That was the beginning of me starting again.

You become acutely aware, if you're touring a lot, that you need new songs to invigorate the live show. And make it interesting for yourself, too.

Unlike the expressionists, I have never been interested in renewing the world through the vehicle of art.

The only reason to write a new song is because you're tired of the old ones.

I really admire the great Japanese artists who could change their name three times in a lifetime. You could get rid of one and renew yourself.

I never want to give people something I've already given them; I wanna give them something new, you know? So the people who've been enjoying my music for years, I hope they continue to enjoy.

To paraphrase president Kennedy's inaugural, the torch has been passed to a new generation of cartoonists and they are doing really interesting stuff, taking the old cliches and breathing new life into them and inventing new ones. This doesn't mean the previous generation of which I'm a charter member isn't doing good stuff but this new material is invigorating everyone.

I believe every artiste, at some point, needs to take a step back.

Art is changing. Again. Here. Now. Opportunities to witness this are rare, so attend and observe.