Unpredictable Art Quotes

Writing a novel - unlike operating a piece of heavy machinery, say, or cooking a chicken - is not a skill that can be taught. There is no standard way of doing it, just as there is no means of telling, while you're doing it, whether you're doing it well or badly. And merely because you've done it well once doesn't mean you can do it well again.

Theater is completely different from film or television. It has a beginning and a middle and an end and it's different every night. And it's far preferable to any other except in the sense of not getting paid, people who want to eat should do film and television.

I don't develop anything. I don't practice, I don't rehearse. I just go out there, and it's just amazing and unpredictable and spontaneous every single time. It's the most cultivating incredible performance that you can go and see live for the amount of money that you can see it for.

You never know what an artist is going to create next.

Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist, there are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges and absorbs the impact.

A lot of making TV is lightening in a bottle.

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.

One of the things about dealing with an artist is that their art is essentially - if they're successful, it's kind of lightning in a bottle. There is no formula for it.

Batty as it sounds, subject and style may choose artists, through some unfathomable cosmic means. How else to explain that even artists who enjoy what they do can be perplexed or even horrified that they're doing it?

Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a musical idea, no matter how innovative, is threatened.