Don’t worry if people think you’re crazy. You are crazy. You have that kind of intoxicating insanity that lets other people dream outside of the lines and become who they’re destined to be.
All art is quite useless.
The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.
A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.
And now, I'm just trying to change the world, one sequin at a time.
He took his pain and turned it into something beautiful. Into something that people connect to. And that's what good music does. It speaks to you. It changes you.
Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple.
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.
Art without emotion its like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag.
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.
Art is the proper task of life.
The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.
A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.
The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.