I think every work of art is an act of faith, or we wouldn't bother to do it. It is a message in a bottle, a shout in the dark. It's saying, 'I'm here and I believe that you are somewhere and that you will answer if necessary across time, not necessarily in my lifetime.'
You never write a theme for a movie thinking, 'This will live forever.'
It became like a symbolic thing, to be “an artist.” After Duchamp, I realized that being an artist is more about a lifestyle and attitude than producing some product.
If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.
I don't think all music that is considered 'avant-garde' is bad, but it's definitely elitist. I hope my music is not that.
I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.
I don't believe in the philosophy of stumbling across hit records.
There are times pop music is the end result when I'm in the studio, but I don't really go in and say, 'Today I am going to make a pop song,' but it can happen.
Art needs to stand for something.
I don't write for any group. I write to bring about a change in consciousness.
I just want people to hear the music the way it's suppose to sound, the way we meant for them to hear it. You sit in the studio all this time and make the music, tweak it, try to get it perfect. They should be able to hear it that way.
How absurd these critics must seem to me, who in their modern wantonness have become so ingenious. They want to interpret my Tannhauser as specifically Christian and impute to him a tendency to impotent glorification!
I don't make music for eyes. I make music for ears.
A movie is just like a work of art or a book or a piece of music. The intent of its maker is one thing, but its interpretation by an audience is something else. I don't stop at what the filmmaker wanted to do.
There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake.
Plot was always secondary in my mind.
What I don't like is taking it to extremes and making all these intellectualizations about what basically is simple music. It's simple stream-of-consciousness stuff in my songs. What I'm trying to get across is misinterpreted.
Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.
I always try hard to arrange all media in a way so that it expresses what I want - this is not limited to one medium alone and varies from case to case.
Do I appreciate the idea of jealousy, revenge and all these so-called dark qualities? Yes. Do I write these songs in order to engage in some public war with someone? No.
I see myself as a hip-hop artist, but I never wanted to make music for a specifically white audience. That's not what I grew up around.
One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all.
I don't want the viewer to be able to peel away the layers of my painting like the layers of an onion and find that all the blues are on the same level.
Art is about trying to find the good in people, and making the world a more compassionate place.
I didn't want people to sit there and watch 10 minutes of film, and all they write about is 48 frames.
