Artistic Curiosity Quotes

I was listening to Ministry and Garth Brooks and Charlie Pride and Wynton Marsalis, and then I would listen to Juvenile or Lil Wayne. It's just that I'm a big fan of music. I'm a student of music. And I just want to learn and keep enhancing my education about the music.

What is great about art and artists is that we get to ask the questions, even though we may never know the answers.

People think it's strange how briskly I move through museums. Sure, I could stand in front of each piece and stare at it for a good long time. But that's not me.

Every character I approach, from 'Forrest Gump' all the way up to 'The Spoils Before Dying,' has a different set of requirements and always fascinates me.

I think, by nature, human beings are curious. And I think that's only amplified as an artist.

The first idea, the first art piece I ever did, was when I was four. I cut the seed of a pear in half and the seed of an apple in half in put those two halves together and planted the seed, hoping a very strange tree might grow. And I never stopped.

You know I was curious - I was interested in all kinds of mystery or deeper meanings in the paintings because I myself have not analyzed why they have turned out like this or like that.

I'd always had this hankering to try some opera.

I have a memory of listening to Tracy Chapman and just being intrigued by her voice. Even as a young girl, I wanted to know more about her and her story. I felt I was learning about her through her music. That was a revelation to me.

Take '39 Steps'. When I finished writing it, I counted the number of measures in the composition. I always do this because I am interested in the length of a song. So I counted this one a couple of times because 39 is an unusual number of measures for a song.

Despite being a classical musician, I keep poking my nose in other genres of music.

As a filmmaker, my approach is to come in not with preconceived notions, but with curiosity, and in that way, whether my subjects are James Carville or Anna Wintour or Dick Cheney, I am always surprised.

There were two things I discovered when I toured with Snoop. One was that the band was all jazz musicians. The second was to instil in me a respect for other styles of music. From then on, whenever I played a new kind of music, I came with the same kind of open mind. What are they trying to do? What are they hearing? How do they see music?

I began working within the streets of Harlem, where, after graduating from Yale [University, New Haven, CT], I became the artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem [New York, NY]. I wanted to know what that was about. I would actually pull people from off of the streets and ask them to come to my studio.

I never took drug to escape. I know some people take drugs to escape, but I took drugs because I was an experimenter. And an artist. And I was always trying to go to the other side of that veil and get information, like all writers have done through the millennia. To get some insights on how the whole thing works, if there's any way to know how it works, and write about it.

It quickly came to be that I grew interested in photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason.

Technology is huge; I wanted to learn about it. People might say that's odd, but I think it's odd if artists aren't interested in the world around them. I'm always chasing that.

A good piece of art raises questions.

I'm not shy about trying to find what truth there is in any genre, whether that be an action piece, a sci-fi piece, a small indie film, or a play. I'm open to it all.

Being a musician - and I like to think of myself as a musician with a capital M - you need to be an omnivore, and I think the best musicians will listen to anything and love everything, and I do.

The last thing I want to do is to write about real things. I am not interested in reality and in real human beings and their real day-to-day problems - I just want to say to them, 'Hold still, and I'm just going to unpack, see what's inside.'

Ever since I was little, I was so infatuated with everything concerning the arts.

My love of fine art increased - the more of it I saw, the more of it I wanted to see.

For better or worse, I've always been curious musically. Whether it's opera or Judy Garland or pop, I've deliberately sought those things out. I've never wanted to do the same things over and over. Some think I've accomplished what I set out to do, and others consider me a dilettante.

When literature becomes overly erudite, it means that interest in the art has gone and curiosity about the artist is what's important. It becomes a kind of idolatry.