Kenneth Clark Quotes

There is some reason, obviously, that you are drawn to your material, but the way in which you explore it might come to be quite different from what you would expect.

I love architecture almost as much as I love my musicals.

Opera combines pretty basic theater and poetry, but the storyline itself is actually quite poetic and, after some digital research, taking that actual content and seeing it as undeniably poetic.

Architecture is a ride - a physical ride and an intellectual ride.

We've got to find a way to protect the process of making musical theater.

It is obvious that anything a scientist discovers or invents is based on previous discoveries and inventions. The same applies to the arts.

Creating and producing creative work, to me, those are all happy accidents.

The number of e-mails and letters that I get from choreographers, from sculptors, from composers who are being inspired by science is huge.

I know the world of opera so intimately: historical sweep, sharply defined characters, not too rational an explanation of what's going on. It's a feast.

There was so much on 'Superstar' that we didn't intend. I mean, there were things that we did which were innovative, but some of them were forced on us because we couldn't get anybody to do the show. 'Evita' was much more sophisticated. That doesn't make it better, but it does make it different. We knew what we were doing.

A contemporary artist like Grayson Perry is brilliant partly because of his expert knowledge of art history, not despite it.

What makes a good work of art is something that honors certain traditions and breaks with others.

More and more I find that in order to create effectively one has to consider delirium and, yes, organize it.

You have a pre-conceived notion of what you want the scene to be, but once you get there, that goes out the window and it turns out to be a way that you never imagined.

The hand that rounded Peter's dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity; Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew: The conscious stone to beauty grew.

Now the culture is made of old things, it's a collage. Art made out of art is not art. You're supposed to make art out of life.

One of the things that's fascinating about making movies is a movie when it's done and you start showing it to people, it reveals its impact, which is often times not what you thought.

To allow only the kind of art that the average man understands is the worst small-mindedness and the murder of mind and spirit. It is my conviction that the intellect can be certain that in doing what most disconcerts the crowd, in pursuing the most daring, unconventional advances and explorations, it will in some highly indirect fashion serve man - and in the long run, all men.

You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.

Well, something must be done for May, The time is drawing nigh-- To figure in the Catalogue, And woo the public eye. Something I must invent and paint; But oh my wit is not Like one of those kind substantives That answer Who and What?

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.

Now, that can be a traditional form or it can be something you're inventing. It can be the development of a metaphor, the working through of a metaphor.

You can't be a proper writer without a touch of madness, can you?

I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.