Creative Reaction Quotes

Here's the thing that people don't understand: I don't really care. I've never been a careerist. It's not a strategy. I react to certain characters and story lines and specific mode of filmmaking.

The funniest thing is not who influenced me positively, but who influenced me negatively. I had such an aversion to what Busby Berkeley did; in my early formative years, I thought it was terrible. Now, I think it's wonderful. But then, I wanted to do anything but what Busby Berkeley did.

'Safe' was a script that I read and flipped out for.

I was 3 years old and Mary Poppins [1964] made an impression on me that was seismic, apparently. I fell into some kind of total creative, imaginative rapture over that movie that propelled this industry of Mary Poppins drawings, plays, performances - just an obsessive, creative reaction to it.

Every painting I do is related to the last one: it may be a continuation of a previous painting or it may be a reaction against it.

Why are all the artists so dead-set on distorting? It seems to be a reaction against photography, but I'm not sure.

I teach a graduate photo seminar at Yale, and I sometimes feel so overwhelmed by the task the students set before themselves to be artists, because - it seems so quaint, but when I picked up a camera with a group of other women, I'm not gonna say it was a radical act, but we were certainly doing it in some sort of defiance of, or reaction to, a male-dominated world of painting.

The natural reaction of the artist will be strongly towards bringing man back into focus as the center of importance.

The power of art is as powerful as weapons of mass destruction; it's just where war destroys, art inspires. But in order to inspire, you need to react to it. And, if it doesn't penetrate your mind, you can't react to it.