Enduring Art Quotes

Never can the innate power of a work be hidden or locked away. A work of art can be forgotten by time; it can be forbidden and rejected but the elemental will always prevail over the ephemeral.

It's a wonderful thing to be able to see your music going from generation to generation.

My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever.

Every authentic work of art is a gift offered to the future.

Art is not disposable.

All the buzz can be very much here today and gone tomorrow, but my focus is creating music that will last forever.

I think it's important for every artist to have that ballad that stands the test of time.

Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.

I want to be somebody, a person, first that people remember, but also, I want music that I release to still be around. I don't want it to just be cool for a second and be gone.

I've been lucky enough to do a few films that will last longer than an opening weekend and those films are the ones I'm proud of.

The first among mankind will always be those who make something imperishable out of a sheet of paper, a canvas, a piece of marble, or a few sounds

Art may not have the power to change the course of history, but it can provide a perspective on historical events that needs to be heard, even if it's seldom heeded. After all the temporary influences that once directed the course of history have vanished, great art survives and continues to speak to each generation.

The most important thing is to make quality music that will last.

Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to worship at the temple of Jupiter. But Horace's poetry has lasted longer than Jupiter's religion, and Jupiter himself has only survived because he disappeared into literature.

Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.

My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration.

When I'm dead, I wanna leave a body of work, like authors or great painters do. I don't wanna get ideas above my station, but why shouldn't this be comparable? Pop music was supposed to be a flash in the pan, but here we are 50 years later, and it means something to us, and it always will do. It's incredibly important.

It's really interesting making films and actually seeing the life that they have in the subsequent years and seeing which ones stand up over time and which ones sort of fade away.

When music is crashing around us, when you hear the same five songs on the radio that aren't really saying much, we can always go back to great music. Great music always lives on.

We've had hassles, ups and downs, ins and outs, failures and triumphs. We're human beings, and we're not perfect. And we're mortal. But the Beach Boys is musically a tremendous body of work that transcends individuality and time and national boundaries.

Some artists leave remarkable things which, a 100 years later, don't work at all. I have left my mark; my work is hung in museums, but maybe one day the Tate Gallery or the other museums will banish me to the cellar... you never know.

Songs remain. They last...A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's the power of songs.

I always want to do music that inspires or influences another generation. You want what you create to live, be it sculpture or painting or music. Like Michelangelo, he said, “I know the creator will go, but his work survives. That is why to escape death, I attempt to bind my soul to my work.

The only quality that endures in art is a personal vision of the world. Methods are transient: personality is enduring.

Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.