Cai Guo-Qiang Quotes

I think that every artistic venture is a risk, and it has to be that way, so you do as much preparation as you can and make that as thorough as you can possibly make it, until you turn up on set. It's about taking risks, and some might work and some might not, but that's what makes it interesting.

I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself.

I'm prepared to take risks. And every movie that I do is a risk. No one knows what the movie is going out turn out like.

The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.

I feel that when you care about your music, taking risks is something you should do to keep things exciting.

Obsession remains the price of creation, and the writer who declines that risk will come up with nothing more creative than 'The Foxes of Harrow' or 'Mrs. Parkington.'

I truly believe that cinema is a collaborative effort, and as long as I get to tell, and be part of, interesting stories and work with genuine people, I don't see any project as a 'risk.'

You need a director, a script, and a role to justify a risk.

If there was no risk, it wouldn't be art. It wouldn't be worth making. There is risk even in a fairy tale. Fiction is closest to pure narrative, and pure narrative is simply the logic we try to impose on an ever-changing reality.

Herman Melville said that artists have to take a dive and either you hit your head on a rock and you split your skull and you die … or that blow to the head is so inspiring that you come back and do the best work that you ever did. BUT you have to take the dive and you do not know what the results will be.

I put everything I can into a record. That's what art is for. I take a risk every time I do one with my whole being.

Making art is an act of courage. Do you know who said that?

Faith is almost the bottom line of creativity; it requires a leap of faith any time we undertake a creative endeavor, whether this is going to the easel, or the page, or onto the stage.

My experience creatively is different than my experience in life, for, as my father would say, the simple reason that you can't get hurt when everything goes wrong creatively.

Each time I undertake to paint a picture I have a sensation of leaping into space. I never know whether I shall fall on my feet. It is only later that I begin to estimate more exactly the the effect of my work.

You hope that the ideas will come together. You just don't know. That's part of what I suppose is part of being brave and putting creative work out there.

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

In reality, however, an artist is a product of art

I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write

Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.

The art of making art, is putting it together.

I have been struggling with mental illness and emptiness throughout my life. Now I want people to understand my glorious quest for the truth. Working on paintings is a process toward my artistic creation. It is a new spiritual theme of my whole philosophy for pursuing the truth. Each painting represents a process in all of my art.

No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.

It's different for every writer. It's not a career for anyone who needs security. It's a career for gamblers. It's a career of ups and downs.