Iconic Imagery Quotes

You can't explain much in 60 seconds, but when you show Michael Jordan, you don't have to. It's that simple.

The most powerful visual in America today is actually the Statue of Liberty.

I'm a poet born in the era of Andy Warhol and a generation that wanted to be famous.

When I play a gig and look out at the audience, you're literally looking at a sea of Joy Division T-shirts.

One cannot set out to make a work that's spiritual. What is a contemporary iconography for the spiritual? Is it some fuzzy space?

One night in the early sixties I passed something on the Long Island Expressway just before the Queens tunnel that I must have seen for years. The billboard advertising cigars, Dutch Masters. I realized it was sort of perfect. It's weird isn't it? You're looking at Rembrandt - in neon! It was too much, it was irresistible.

Before I came to New York, I only had a few pictures of the city in my mind. And you know 'That Girl?' Marlo Thomas jumping with her hat? I always loved that, and I wondered what that double street she crosses is. And it's Park Avenue! And that's what I can see out my window.

One of the reasons that DC, Marvel, and other comic book companies have always asked me to do covers and variant covers is because they know that when they tell me 'icon,' I jump over their words, and I give them an iconic cover - but while I'm doing it, there is going to be an idea there.

In all my shows, I'm not interested in the iconic shots of the Capitol and the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. I'm always interested in trying to get the culture of the place - trying to get it right.

Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.

Because Bin Laden's culture doesn't permit the worship of images, they understand how powerful images are. We wouldn't have thought of creating a visual bomb. In a way, he's chopped down two iconic buildings, and used our very truth imagery, to express himself. It's fascinating... I mean, dreadful.

One of the best decisions we made on the 'Arrow' pilot was to have the Deathstroke mask. Within 30 seconds, you knew you were watching a DC comics show.

Luke and Vader's light saber duel in 'Return of the Jedi' gives me chills every time. Even the still photo of the two of them in silhouette, sabers crossed, gives me a rush.

Remember when Jay-Z wore a Che Guevara T-shirt? Nobody knew who Che was. Then Jay-Z wears it, and it's everywhere.

If Abstract Expression reached for the sublime, Pop turned ordinary imagery into icons. Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol illuminated the transformative power of context and the process of reproduction. Claes Oldenburg's soft ice-cream cones and hamburgers changed sculpture from hard to soft, from stasis to transformation.

Walt Disney was a master of the human psychology. His sense of timing, sense of speed. In a sense, those cartoons are like Rorschach tests.

The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.

And yet I think The White Cliffs of Dover one of my best films.

Even if you haven't seen 'The Seventh Seal,' you've seen it. The influence is so vast and insidious, every image of a black-robed, white-faced Death is a rip or parody of 'The Seventh Seal.'

when I moved to Canada in '93, I started reading fashion magazines, and that's where I spotted the M.A.C ad that RuPaul were in. That's sort of how I first "met" you - in the red bodysuit. That was so iconic to me.

When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of the book.

These days, no celebrity on a magazine cover, including Brad Pitt, Oprah Winfrey, Julia Roberts, or Leonardo DiCaprio, could possibly match the visual punch of Alfred E. Neuman, the gap-toothed, grinning boy, goofily peeking out at us on the newsstand.

What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and making whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in ten seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.

What interests me about genre is that the public connects immediately with it, it has certain rules, certain codes the audience recognizes. I can use that to create something very big.