Lea Seydoux Quotes

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decides this? Does algebra move you to tears? Can plural possessives express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe!

I know how art has come in and really changed my life, so to give these children that opportunity just to come into contact with art - that's wonderful.

In fact, every day I'll read a chapter of some art book. I don't know why. It's just a habit.

I got a book token for Christmas and exchanged it for a book called A History of Art, and that book (which I still have-battered and falling to pieces) became more precious to me than any Bible.

It's art that's taught me to think and to write.

Working abroad made me better.

As a child, it was really hard because I'd be thrown into a new school and have to make new friends, or I'd sit in class for months without speaking the language, but as I got older, I welcomed the possibility of discovering new cultures and languages.

You never really know what's inspired you or made you who you are, but I was really lucky that I got to grow up in places like Japan and Hong Kong that are super energetic and have this intensity to them.

Every time I come to India - where I have grown up - if I spent 20 years in this country, I will never be able to uncover all of the hidden jewels.

Inspiration is around you. Like, when I travel any country, be it Paris or London, while walking on the streets, the architecture, the restaurants all inspire me. Inspiration for design could be anywhere.

I read tons of books, listen to music non-stop, watch as many movies as possible, catch a play when I can, art shows, concerts, bar talks - I just try to engage in art, which to me is everywhere, as often as I can because narrative lives in it all.

I've been influenced by my travels across India and the globe.

I was very surprised when I first started spending time in America. The culture shock was something I wasn't prepared for. I had a lot of work to do to try to begin to understand this enormous and complex country that I thought would be an easy process.

It was a little harder when I first went to Egypt when I was 18 years old and being a white woman with a knapsack and in blue jeans. But again I was part of the rucksack revolution there was some grace there. You could put it that way. And confidence as well because I thought of myself as a poet. That was part of it. I was going for that, to have experiences to make the work.

Going to the Far East was my first eye-opener to a world vastly different from my own. Then when I was 16 I lived in Paris for a year and studied mime. At 21 I went to Indonesia. I had planned to go for three months, but I stayed four years. I just got lost in the culture.

The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.

The good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it.

It used to happen, and still happens, to me to take no pleasure in a work of art at the first sight of it, because it is too much for me; but if I suspect any merit in it, I try to get at it; and then I never fail to make the most gratifying discoveries--to find new qualities in the work itself and new faculties in myself.

That experience of touching down in a totally foreign place is like having a blank canvas: You begin with nothing, but stroke by stroke you build a life. This process requires everything great art requires-risk-tasking, hope, a great deal of imagination, all the qualities that are the building blocks of art. You must be able to dream something nearly impossible and toil to bring it into existence.

For I assure you, without travel, at least for people from the arts and sciences, one is a miserable creature!... A man of mediocre talents always remains mediocre, may he travel or not - but a man of superior talents, which I cannot deny myself to have without being blasphemous, becomes - bad, if he always stays in the same place.

Do people choose the art that inspires them — do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller.

Between 18 and 19 years old [in the 1950s] I came to Paris. I studied art. And that experience really did change my life. I was living hand to mouth. I walked everywhere. I thought, this city is incredible but you really have to experience it by walking it.

I've travelled a lot, but I am essentially American. All my input has been American.

I was surrounded by art by virtue of not only the educational opportunities that my mother's foresight availed me to.