Art is not truth; art is the lie which makes us see the truth.
I do write a lot from personal experience, but I also embellish a bit.
Pele featured in the Brazilophile imaginary as the a figure of non-utile excess, a carefree artist in the Nietzschean sense, indifferent to the narrow teleology of winning matches... check the way that most of the endlessly replayed footage we see of Pele is not of him scoring goals, but audaciously missing chances contrived by force of wit.
Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.
Anything that exists on the human palette is, from my point of view, fair game for artists to portray. You don't have to go see it if you don't want to, so don't go.
Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.
I'm not precious about anything. The effort it took to get something means nothing to me in post.And it means nothing to the audience. I'll chop limbs off. I'll put an arm where a leg should be. I'll do anything.
With rap, it's a funny thing. You can say things, and people can take 'em the way they wanna take 'em.
We do not fear censorship for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue—the same liberty that is conceded to the art of the written word, that art to which we owe the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.
If you've done a brilliant version it becomes something else.
There are no rules in art.
History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art.
Life imitates art -- but badly.
When I'm writing, I can always play around with tense. I can always make past present. I can always kind of manipulate, and I can always be delusional in a way that's completely self-serving. With film, it's like, the camera can't really lie. It can manipulate to a certain extent.
I have never looked for dream in reality or reality in dream. I have allowed my imagination free play, and I have not been led astray by it.
Every artist that I've parodied has been cool with it so far. I know one hasn't loved a version of it, but she didn't sue me over it or make me take it down. They've all been pretty cool.
Art is not journalism. In art, you don't make it to convey a message.
The advocates of a criminal are seldom artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the deed to the advantage of the doer.
If you lined up 10 writers and asked them to write a movie about Steve Jobs, you'd get 10 very different movies.
Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: 'How do you see the world, and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?'
Spike Lee is a master of tone, so basically, if he wants to do something, he should do it, and Imma listen.
There are definitely people who disagree with certain creative decisions you make. Pleasing everyone is pretty hard.
I hate the analyzing thing. People say, 'Why do you think your character did that? I don't know. I'm not an analyst, and they're not in psychotherapy. Unless it's a film where they're in therapy.
Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.
Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.
