Quotes About Expression

When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom, the work is likely to sprawl.

The final test of a work of art is not whether it has beauty, but whether it has power.

I function as a channel from which music emerges from the chaos of noise.

Preparation is the be-all of good trial work. Everything else - felicity of expression, improvisational brilliance - is a satellite around the sun. Thorough preparation is that sun.

I see songs not as a commodity used up when the album goes off the charts, which is often the case with pop songs. I see them as a body of work. Life should be breathed into them.

Paint is a very sensual material. It's lovely to work with and lovely to look at.

I'm very happy to hear that my work inspires writers and painters. It's the most beautiful compliment, the greatest reward. Art should always be an exchange.

You work your butt off and somebody says you can't have your record played because it offends them. Tyrants are made of such stuff.

I am a real ham. I love an audience. I work better with an audience. I am dead, in fact, without one.

I deny that either singers or conductors can "create" or work creatively - this, as I have always said, is a conception that leads to the abyss.

What the artist owes the world is his work; not a model for living.

When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music. Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?

A work becomes a work of art when one re-evaluates the values of nature and adds one's own spirituality.

Do not finish your work too much. An impression is not sufficiently durable for its first freshness to survive a belated search for infinite detail; in this way you let the lava grow cool.

I want to be the joy to people through my work.

True artists are almost the only men who do their work for pleasure.

I'm not a very confessional artist, you know. I don't ever reveal what I'm feeling in my work, or what I think about the President. I use nature. I use found images.

I'm known as a light artist. But rather than be someone who depicted light, or painted light in some way, I wanted to have the work be light.

Monet's work would have been even greater if he had not abandoned figure-painting.

My mountaineering skills are not important to my best photographs, but they do add a component to my work that is definitely a bit different than that of most photographers.

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.

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

I like to think of my work as creating a private conversation with each person, no matter how public each work is and no matter how many people are present