Artistic Demands Quotes

There's a lot of maintenance that goes into being a professional singer.

I've directed a couple of times in the theater, but I wouldn't make a habit of it because it's too consuming.

A poet has to adapt himself, more or less consciously,to the demands of his vocation, and hence the peculiarities of poets and the condition of inspiration which many people have said is near to madness... The problem of creative writing is essentially one of concentration... a focusing of the attention in a special way.

I'm learning to work under pressure. Yesteryear songs are slow and demanding on the expressions.

When you're a film-maker, sometimes you have to be a slave to continuity.

Musical people always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be perfectly deaf.

The play is a marvelous form, but it demands less than a novel.

I've worked with very few directors who've asked of me what I asked of myself.

The point is that I am such a big fan of Puccini and that Butterfly is the most difficult and complete role that you can imagine. Just to sing it with a good voice is not enough: it asks tears from your soul. I am very emotional on stage, and the music is so tender that I suffer for real when I am singing it. So I cannot do many performances.

When you put a tremendous amount of love into your work, as in any relationship, you can't know - you can only hope - that what you're offering will in some way be received. You shape your love to artistic demands, to the rigors of your genre. But still, it's a labor of love, and it's the nature of love that you must give it freely.

There are so many challenges and different parts to the job of singing. When you're in the studio, you have to be really, really, precise. You've got to keep everything clean and nice because that's going to be something that's down forever. And then you go onstage, and it's much more in the moment.

My work requires acting at its most committed - it demands actors of enormous resilience, but also intelligence and wit. It doesn't work for narcissistic or selfish actors.

We're actors, we have to do what we have to do, and you have to be really solid within yourself.

Every story has its demands.

You don't merely give over your creativity to making a film - you give over your life! In theatre, by contrast, you live these two rather strange lives simultaneously; you have no option but to confront the mould on last night's washing-up.

Unless the work of art has wholly exhausted its maker's attention, it fails. This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding.

Doing multiple character work is athletic in every way - vocally, physically, spiritually, and mentally. With a show like 'Passing Strange,' I usually lose about 12 pounds.

It's amazing how, in New York, there is almost a feeling of entitlement by the public - this very palpable lack of surprise at being stopped in the street and being asked to be the subject of a 12-foot monumental painting.

Please do not strain yourself, Miss Doyle. I won't have my girls going cross-eyed in the name of art.

All musicians and artists - we all got quirks that have to be put up with at certain times.

Movies, there are moments when you're writing a song or demoing, a moment in the recording studio. Musicals much more just eat up your life for a certain period of time.

No generation is interested in art in quite the same way as any other; each generation, like each individual, brings to the contemplation of art its own categories of appreciation, makes its own demands upon art, and has its own uses for art.