An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.
I am searching for abstract ways of expressing reality, abstract forms that will enlighten my own mystery.
I have quite a rich inner life, and I'm constantly looking for a way to express that. I haven't found it yet in acting. When you're playing a character, you're only going to find outlets for very specific parts of your inner world.
The reason I play so many sounds, maybe it sounds angry, is because I'm trying so many things at one time, you see? I haven't sorted them out. I have a whole bag of things that I'm trying to work through and get the one essential.
As an artist, one doesn't know what is real. And so there's a search and a process of trying to locate something that feels or appears or somehow resonates with us on a deeper level. This is why art is such an interesting business to be in.
All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.
Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.
For me, acting is like a pool you dive into. If you're lucky, you find what you need, then get out again.
Music is a treasure hunt. You dig and dig, and sometimes you find something.
It is this research into pure painting that is the problem at the present moment. I do not know any painters in Paris who are really searching for this ideal world.
My ultimate search has been for a muse.
Coming up, a lot of people I looked up to had a signature sound, but I came up, and I was always in search of one, trying to find it, trying to create one. I was never really able to have a creative signature sound, you know?
You're just sort of searching for this 'thing' and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't. All music is imperfect, but in jazz since you're improvising, at least the way I play, I'm trying to follow my train of thought in a solo.
Music and acting are the same thing: you must understand that art is only the search, not the final form.
The heavy odds against finding the desired... work of art in the mess and flux of life, as opposed to the serene orderliness of imagined reality, give a special tense dazzle and an atmosphere of tour de force to any photographs that succeed in the search.
I'd experimented with so many different types of music. I had these folky songs I'd written and recorded, but something wasn't quite right.
Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it, but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task.
The playful search for beauty.
real art is religion, a search for the beauty of God deep in all things.
The feeling of an evolution is a constant for every artist who is pursuing the search of refinement and enlargement of his/her own means of expression.
For me, writing is not a search for explanations but a ramble in quest of what informs a place, a hunt for equivalents.
