Artistic Storytelling Quotes

My body is my journal, and my tattoos are my story.

I feel blessed every day when I'm working on these paintings... the first artist to ever go to another world and try to tell stories that people care about.

I thought it would be more interesting to make a musical autobiography than an actual autobiography.

Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.

What you'll always get from me is a variety of emotions. Whenever you listen to my CD, whether you're the hardest dude or the bitterest cat, I'll give you a real story to think about.

What a great thing! To be a writer! Words are something you can carry in your head. You can really 'travel light.'

I believe in the American theatre. I believe in its power to inform about the human condition, its power to heal ... its power to uncover the truths we wrestle from uncertain and sometimes unyielding realities.

My passion is more in songwriting than ... in being a star.

You have to want to make a film for other reasons - to say something, to tell a story, to show somebody's fate - but you can't want to make a film simply for the sake of it.

Songwriting is a really fortunate skill to have to frame living and to find new ways to observe things you're going through.

A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty.

J. Ivy is a brilliant man with an incredible voice and a way with words. I've known him for over a decade and owe my stage name to him believing in me back then before I even had a record deal. I'm excited for him to share his truth with the world.

We're going to sing about things that matter to us. The balancing act is to present these ideas but also make the music exciting and sort of fun enough that even if you're not paying attention to the lyrics, you might still like the songs anyway. That's the idea.

any mystery writer is both magician and moralist ... two species of artist in short supply.

What is my intention being a filmmaker? To make as much money as possible, or get as much attention as possible? It's not really either of those things. Now I can tell the stories that I want to tell.

People like to come up to me and tell me that I’ve got nice ink. Except these tattoos aren’t just decorations. They are declarations. Every tattoo I have tells its own story about who I am. Drug-free. Honor. And a war against the system.

I love 'Breathless,' and 'Paris, Texas,' and 'Badlands.' I was obsessed with those films in my teens. I remember watching 'Badlands' and being amazed that there were these scenes in which nobody said anything and the silence told the whole story.

PowerPoint may not be of any use for you in a presentation, but it may liberate you in another way, an artistic way. Who knows.

Never try to convey your idea to the audience - it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they'll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.

Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.

In some exquisite critical hints on "Eurythmy," Goethe remarks, "that the best composition in pictures is that which, observing the most delicate laws of harmony, so arranges the objects that they by their position tell their own story." And the rule thus applied to composition in painting applies no less to composition in literature.

When I discovered that I could write music, it felt like the most natural way for me to connect with people and tell my stories. I've always thought of that as what I do: I tell stories.

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. The writer's job is to turn the unspeakable into words - not just into any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues.

What art ought to do is tell stories which are moment-by-moment wonderful, which are true to human experience, and which in no way explain human experience.