artistic duality Quotes

Right now my career is totally schizophrenic, because when an American production like Hitchcock Presents asks to see my work I would never dream of showing them my independent films.

My working habit is to separate my aims as a painting from my aims as a poet. They come from very different places and ultimately lead me to very different places... I'll leave what I mean by 'places' ambiguous.

I looked at my right hand, the hand with which I painted. There was power in that hand. Power to create and destroy. Power to bring pleasure and pain. Power to amuse and horrify. There was in that hand the demonic and the divine at one and the same time. The demonic and the divine were two aspects of the same force. Creation was demonic and divine. Creativity was demonic and divine. I was demonic and divine.

The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

It's almost schizophrenic who I portray in my music.

I live between two things-I live between art and pop all the time.

A songwriter's supreme challenge is being complex and simple at the same time

I tend to have an odd split in my mind: I tend to look at it as a writer and when the writing thing is OK and I'm happy with it, then I put on my actor's hat.

I like playing with light and shade. I like saying awful things in very pretty ways.

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

It's almost required with major artists that there's some duality. And I've got duality everywhere.

What we are as a live band is different to what we are on recordings, but they're both equal versions: they're both LCD Soundsystem, but in very different ways.

All artists are two-headed calves.

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

The genre I listen to the most is salsa, so people look at me and see this guy who's done mostly romantic ballads, but there's always been this other side.

An artist is only an artist on condition that he neglects no aspect of his dual nature. This dualism is the power of being oneself and someone else at one and the same time.

Music is the most abstract of the arts and also the most physical....music is under two signs, the stars and the wine

any mystery writer is both magician and moralist ... two species of artist in short supply.

Painting is a duality and abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always remains on one level. It is only really interesting in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes.

Any work that is really great hovers between terrific and terrible.

When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer.

All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. BOTH SIDES of the artist's personality must play their part.

I don't think I realized right away that I was switching from being a fan into being a performer. I've always tried to maintain that duality, because I think fandom is a way of being porous and curious, but it did feel like a step forward.

Sometimes I think I prefer the storyteller in [Roman Vishniac] to the photographer. But aren't they one and the same?