Simon McBurney Quotes

I'm glad Wu-Tang was able to inspire other producers and artists, but I would never want to be erased or removed.

I really hesitate to say that any of my shows influenced other writers.

The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.

Crumb was such an influence on me. He's such a visionary, such a great artist, that he so shaped my artistic sensibilities on a certain level that I do owe everything to him. The way I see the world is largely changed by him.

I love making music, but if you make something that inspires somebody else to make something, without getting too airy-fairy, you've contributed to the zeitgeist in some way, and that's just an amazing feeling.

The ideas get under your skin. I am honored and deeply excited by the thought that the next generation of writers, or whomever, are influenced by these books.

I met Gerhard Richter and Alighiero Boetti when I was a teenager, and I was really inspired by them. When Boetti died, I realized I only vaguely remembered so many things he told me. It was such a pity. Had I only recorded his voice, he would still be with me, and I could listen to it from time to time.

As Richard Pryor was to Eddie Murphy, that's what Kurt Vonnegut was to me.

Everything we do helps the new artists in the long run.

As an actress, I think it's important to look back and realize that we aren't always quite as original as we think we are. There's this grand, textured history for us over the last 100 years of incredible writers, directors, and performers.

Great art inspires great art.

It's very lucky when you have an artist - whether it's a novelist or a filmmaker or a singer - whose career you can follow from the beginning and feel that you are in some way part of it, or part of the same world that it comes out of.

Anyone in the arts has had an experience of seeing someone who they related to doing something and thinking, 'I could do that.' If you have one generation where you force its hand a bit, then the next one fills in the gaps, because it's seen an example of what can be done.

The one artist who actually had influence over me was Bo Bartlett.

Exposing yourself to many kinds of art can only lead to amazing things. It helps you learn about your own art, your own taste, what kind of art you want to create for yourself.

That's what great art does - it inspires other artists to do great art, and that's what it should do.

The great thing is anytime you see an artist that has a piece of what I've already done, you can see it from afar. 'He's doing that lil' hammer right there' - whether it's the energy, the swag or the look - it's a blessing.

Literature usually begets literature.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

I feel close to people like Jimi Hendrix because I connect with his music. Not the man but what he did.

A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.

I want to be one of those people, be they writers, poets, musicians, who leaves clues for the next generation. The really good people leave clues that help feed the human race. That's my aspiration.

More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.

The saving grace of all really great gifts is that the persons who bear their burden remain superior to what they have done, at least as long as the source of creativity is alive.

In art the Greeks were the children of the Egyptians. The day may yet come when we shall do justice to the high powers of that mysterious and imaginative people.