Artistic Contribution Quotes

If you think about filmmaking as an entire spectrum, starting with the writer and ending with maybe the marketing department, the actor's contribution is a rather slender band.

I don't know if I actually respect other artists as people as much as I should. I look at their work as excellent data that feeds my mind as nature feeds my body.

Every authentic work of art is a gift offered to the future.

Artists die twice. First creatively. Then physically. The second one is the easiest.

As an actor you don't control the end result. Because you're a director, you get to control the end result. I think for us, we really have to show up and participate and give. And then let go.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn't always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

I want to be remembered for making great music and doing great things for people.

Whenever I've done jobs, whether it's an acting job or writing job, there's an aspect of it that feels like you help build your piece of it, and then you watch as someone takes it, and they finish building it.

I would like to live forever in people's hearts and minds; that would be fun. I'll leave the world my art.

John Coltrane was an addict; Billie Holiday was an addict; Eugene O'Neill was an addict. What would America be without addicts and post-addicts who make such grand contributions to our society?

My work is better, maybe all filmmakers are better, for Polanski's imprint on cinema. He created language for all of us to use, there is no question about that.

Not everybody has that mentality and that's fine, but once Robert Redford leaves this earth - later rather than sooner - his legacy will go on.

I think, at the end of the day, that was really what the reward for production is for me, is being allowed to be a part of somebody else's musical vision for a while. Like Gwar. I got to do a Gwar record, right? That was great.

Unfortunately for humanity, I've gotten into the habit of providing my own closing music for shows by singing a song and playing the ukulele.

I see little more important to the future of our country and our civilization than the full recognition of the place of the artist.

I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

Fame and money are gifts given to us only after we have gifted the world with our best, our lonely, our individual truths.

You are going to have to give and give and give, or there's no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.

People don't remember each tree in a park but all of us benefit from the trees. And in a way, artists are like trees in a park.

That was when Neil discovered Jack Nietzsche. They went off and pretty much came up with that by themselves, but I thought it was a great song, and I was more than happy to do my harmony parts on it.

I'm trying to work only with established, respected directors. I took a lot of bad scripts and worked for a lot of lazy directors, and it was discouraging to go to the screenings and see that the director had added nothing, the editor had added nothing, there was nothing to see.

I feel my poetry has contributed through all these languages that I needed to learn leading up to English.

We've all got to earn a living. And writing songs is what I do. But when I've done a record, it's not that I think it's better or worse than anyone else's, but if I think that nobody else would have done it if I hadn't, well then that's ok.

I had the naive, simplistic idea that producers and writers and artists of the time helped in a minuscule way to change the mind-set of America.

The artist is something of an outsider in America. I have always felt that America does not value its artists, certainly not in the sense that the Europeans do.