Artistic Tension Quotes

A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

The relationship between talent and management is uneasy, at best.

I've never been at odds with the world of contemporary artists. If there is any animosity, it's one-sided.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

If a guitar is too easy for me to play, it makes me too laid back. I like to battle with my guitar.

It's always tense when you move a character from a book to the screen. Always tense.

Controversy is part of the nature of art and creativity.

Creative comedy is like growing geraniums in a mine field.

There is an edginess in my work that people don't always recognize.

In a writer there must always be two people - the writer and the critic.

The Public Theater requires one to be very public, and writing requires one to be very private.

There's not a moment on it that will sound too familiar, as soon as it sounds comfortably familiar then we like to do something with it to take away that comfortable feeling.

No painting can exist without the tension of what it figures and what it concretely consists of. The pleasure of what it could mean and the pain of what it's not.

And me I'm in my bedroom drawing in my notebook Because my hand thinks I'm an artist But my heart knows I'm a poet It's just words they mean so little to me.

I think I've always had these two currents, equally strong, of wanting to change the world and make the world better and fight injustices and fight violence, and then being an artist, which is a very different strain.

Theater is something that as a performance artist you have to hate.

I have always been concerned with painting that simultaneously insists on a flat surface and then denies it.

Until I saw my drawings replayed on the iPad, I'd never seen myself draw. Someone watching me would be concentrating on the exact moment, but I'd always be thinking a little bit ahead. That's especially so in a drawing where you are limiting yourself, a line drawing for example. When you are doing them you are very tense, because you have to reduce everything to such simple terms.

All those crazy Impressionist painters in France were friends but they would write about how jealous and competitive they were. That's what makes good art.

Lennon was not very fond of me. Lennon didn't like to be around somebody else who was likely to be the center of attention and didn't like being on deck with somebody who was intellectually as hot as he was.

I can't fathom writers married to writers and musicians married to musicians. There's your enemy in bed beside you.

If you can say something beautiful in a very terrible way - I was always drawn to that.

I always felt like there were always egos involved when I was trying to get music finished in New Order. Sometimes it would feel like I was running through water.

Many intelligent people, when about to write . . . , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.

The promise of any artwork is that it can hold us - viewer and maker - in a conflicted or contestable space, without real-world injury or loss.