Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being.
We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth.
Real life has always let me down. That's why I do the monologues. I have always said I would rather tell a life than live a life. But I have to live a life in order to tell one.
I could always live in my art but never in my life
I don’t pay attention to the world. I just have the art I like and the music I like and for me that’s the whole world
When I'm singing 'Deanna,' for example, which I sing pretty much every night, it brings forward a kind of imagined, romanticized lie about this particular person, which I find really comforting and exciting to sing about.
Acting, the arts in general, is a magnet for the wounded of society.
It's the same with visual arts, you have some really cool, wonderful striking images that make you think and then again you have wonderful striking images that just take you away from the existing world for a second. And I like the latter a bit more.
It is only through Art and through Art only that we can realize our perfection; Through Art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.
Whenever I go to an opera, I leave my sense and reason at the door with my half-guinea, and deliver myself up to my eyes and my ears.
Politics right now is in a very dark place, and I think the only place for me is to do what I do - make films, create art, watch it as it evolves. Right now it's like Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall, and a great fall is happening. The behavior seems to be really dumb.
Most people just want to be part of the world, they want to live, love, and enjoy themselves - to take part in the world around them. Whereas artists are always retreating, locking the door, and inventing other worlds.
A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.
