Artistic Dilemma Quotes

The challenge artists face today is whether to be an underground, unheard genius, or to dilute their art for the marketplace.

It really broke my heart when music took a back seat when I was concentrating more on films. It was like choosing between two children.

It's such a hard thing to write a song for your fans without sounding naff and thanking them for spending money on you.

I want to be so giving and collaborative, but my best songs were written on my own.

Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to tonality, it’s not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.

Perhaps two million years ago the creatures of a planet in some remote galaxy faced a musical crisis similar to that which we earthly composers face today.

I have one piece of music, since 1997, and I don't see it having lyrics. Where does it go in this world? So I haven't recorded it.

Every artist's problem today is: What will we do with the human?

My whole life has been a twenty years struggle between poetry and prose, or, if you like to call it so, Music and Law.

It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.

I guess that's the big challenge of any art: Do you want to be something for everyone or everything for someone?

There is usually no dreamer so unworldly as the anthologist. He wanders in a vast garden, lost in wonder, unable to decide often between flowers of equal loveliness. ... The true anthologist has the greatest difficulty in finishing his book. There is always just one more, a new, delicious discovery.

Part of the difficulty in trying to be both an artist and a businessperson is this: You make a picture because you have seen something beyond price; then you are to turn and assign to your record of it a cash value. If the selling is not necessarily a contradiction of the truth in the picture, it is so close to being a contradiction—and the truth is always in shades of gray-that you are worn down by the threat.

What you want is the thing that critics love and audiences love, but that's the hardest thing to do.

Everyone always comes to one point in their life as an artist where you can either let your heart guide you or your ego.

I am only limited by the amount of life I have left to capture the ideas I am already working on. Another problem is that I am not sure if I would rather create or collect art. Collecting art is another passion of mine.

There is something abominable about cameras, because they possess the power to invent many worlds. As an artist who has been lost in this wilderness of mechanical reproduction for many years, I do not know which world to start with. I have seen fellow artists driven to the point of frenzy by photography.

I have a real aversion to sentimentality, but I also really want to write about love and friendship.

I was forced to make the decision between art and music which are the only two things I liked as opposed to being able to do them both because that's what I was interested in.

I feel the symbolic world is the nub of a problem for an artist.