Dwight Yoakam Quotes

I do not think that a museum needs to engage with pop culture in order to make itself interesting to museumgoers. Museums are already interesting and engaging with pop culture for its own sake is just a quick way to seem and become dated.

I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.

When you make music, and even if it's commercially successful, it doesn't mean that it's going to hold up. It takes time to sort of take stock of what you've done and whether it's got legs and whether it's going to really have a place.

I think that a society lives or dies according to its respect for - for its art.

Music's designed to be timeless.

It's important to me that my music stands out. 'Taki Taki' doesn't sound like anything else out there, and it's hard to do that when you are on the road all the time, but it's really important to me that how people feel about my work. It was the same with 'Magenta Riddim.'

I don't buy into this idea that pop has to be frivolous or vacuous, and we've never subscribed to that.

Good music will always be recognized in the end.

I believe that the arts of a culture are terribly important and yet almost indefensible.

I did not want to go onstage and play Led Zeppelin songs; there has to be more than that. I wanted to create a complete experience of what Led Zeppelin means to me, growing up around them and being part of it all my life.

Music is a living art.

To me, spending millions of dollars recreating the world's sadness with actors and props and sets - it seems like a kind of arrogant waste of money... Unless, that is, it's a film about an historical event.

Do cave paintings mean anything? Not really, but I, for one, am happy to have them.

We need to have a view that culture has a value in itself, not just in terms of a social and economic value.

I would hope to make a record that interacts with culture in a macro sense. That is something to aspire to.

You want to make a record that stands the test of time and that people enjoy.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

I can't think of anything outside of having the gift yourself and creating yourself. I can't think of the next better thing to do than being able to put it back. Creative expression, I think, is vital to the success of any society.... A society without art will die.

The theater is necessary. Dance is necessary. Song is necessary. The arts are necessary- they are a necessary part of our lives

I still hope that more people can create art, even though artistic genres may never be the most popular or money-making genres. But the thing is, I think art is more long-lasting. It stays in people, and it changes them.

It doesn't matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serve a great cause: accretion of the national wealth.

The life of the arts is far from an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose-and is a test of the quality of a nations' civilization.

The disasteris not the money, although the money will be missed. The disaster is the disrespect--this belief that the arts are dispensable, that they're not critical to a culture's existence.

All art is contemporary, if it's alive, and if it's not alive, what's the point of it?

I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.