I believe, as artists, I do think we have a responsibility, and there's also a place for a lot of different artists. It is nice when music captures the honesty of the time but also what we're going through in that moment.
If you are a good writer - and I think I am - you are able to handle any kind of group and imagine their lives.
Art should be on the side of humanity.
When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.
I can't help slightly falling in love with every character I write about. And I quite like writing about people who are vilified.
The greatest poets are those with memories so great that they extend beyond their strongest experiences to their minutest observations of people and things far outside their own self-centeredness.
The artists who the world has always recognized as the greatest are those with the widest sympathy. The greatness of the great artist depends precisely on the width and the intensity of his sympathy.
The joy of great fiction is that it transports the reader to another world, where new characters live in otherwise unimaginable ways. It is one of the most powerful ways of generating empathy that I know.
Perhaps people ought to feel with more imagination.
A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree.
To write tragedy, a man must feel tragedy. To feel tragedy, a man must be aware of the world in which he lives. Not only with his mind, but with his blood and sinews.
It's very difficult for me to dislike an artist. No matter what he's creating, the fact that he's experiencing the joy of creation makes me feel like we're in a brotherhood of some kind... we're in it together.
"A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist."
I always like to think of the audience when I am directing. Because I am the audience.
Any work of art ... is great when it makes you feel that its creator has dipped into your very heart for his sensation.
When I hear my favorite songwriters write about things they clearly have not experienced, like "Isis" by Bob Dylan or a lot of Bruce Springsteen songs or something like that, I'm always like, "Man, how do I tap into that?" Every time I tried to do something that wasn't autobiographical I felt pretty phony.
I've always felt, even with sketches, that if you don't care about these people, then it doesn't matter.
A writer soon discovers he has no single identity but lives the lives of all the people he creates and his weathers are independent of the actual day around him. I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.
Without imagination, there can be no genuine ardor in any pursuit or for any acquisition, and without imagination, there can be no genuine morality, no profound feeling of other men's sorrow, no ardent and persevering anxiety for their interests.
You spend so much time writing a character the way I did with Buddy Baker and then Green Arrow that you start to care about them. And you almost think of them as people, you know?
Once I start writing about somebody, I become very protective of them.
All great writers are schizophrenics, you know what I'm saying? 'Cause they switch up. They become the person when they write.
I see people sometimes who remind me of my narrators.
A musician cannot move others unless he, too, is moved.
I just see potential in things that aren't there and how it's going to make you feel. Like, if it makes me feel a certain way, I try and create the vibe of how that felt to me. And try and create it for someone else.
