Quotes About Expression

I didn't do so well in the academic world, so I think the only way I could express myself was through visual art - anything I could get my hands on, whether it was glassblowing, sculpture, painting, or photography. I always wanted to be a painter. Or a farmer.

The only reason that you do visual is solely for the visual. That's the only reason. It doesn't sell your music for you.

I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.

By the visual pattern, but mostly I'm guided entirely by my ear, what I hear.

I am very much aware of the visual side of things. I do a lot of photography. I often take Polaroids of things that strike me as visually interesting, just to remember them and perhaps use later.

My true function within a society which embraces all of us is to continue an age-old tradition. This tradition is to create images from the depths of the imagination and to give them form, whether visual, intellectual or musical.

But in the old days, visual artists used to fall into two distinct categories: those of us who created images with cameras and those of us who applied stuff onto other stuff, with brushes or other tools.

Today, music is visual.

Jazz vision is a wordless conversation between musical notes and visual expressions.

My mother is an artist, and I have a strong visual sense. I almost always choose the cover art for my books. I've learned that the more I collaborate, like by having someone do a soundtrack to one of my books, the more I see my own work differently.

When I began to choreograph and find my way pulling other artists' dreams out and changing music in a visual way, there was still a part of me that had something more to say. There was still a desire to rock a stage and ultimately perform the eight count of my dream, but there was a lot of insecurity there.

I like doing clay work. It's different from drawing on a page because you have something to mold into different shapes. It's quite visual, it's a thing you can hold and feel, and that makes it different from drawing.

Everything I do is very visual and very aural, so I don't read music, and I draw as much as I write out lyrics.

The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.

I really like books that you can kind of hear as much as think about, that are so graphic and visual.

Jazz vision for me is seeing my art in musical term. It offers me an visual expressions in an ever-changing musical palette.

Quite honestly, if I were doing work related to a living being or historical being where there was visual or audio recordings available, I would find that extremely difficult because I don't know how you would avoid the process of mimicry. And mimicry, to me at any rate, is a very dull prospect.

Words aren't very good at describing complicated, strange visual things. You can try, and the reader will have some sort of image in their mind, but words aren't good at that.

There's definitely a visual aspect and an emotional aspect to a song. And that harks back, for me, to theater.

I've created, directed and choreographed for Lady Gaga since the beginning, so 'Born This Way,' this was musically such an amazing evolution and such a brilliant record. So when she played it for me, it took me a while to find out the visual interpretation that I could give back to her.

Visual elements are, of course, the director's job.

I am primarily a writer of books, and I enjoy that. But I come to realize that a lot of people prefer a visual medium.

Video is a funny thing. It's one thing to be an artist, singer-songwriter, and use words and create pictures in people's minds. And then be asked to do video for it, to actually give a certain visual for your song.

I believe that who we are, and consequently the work that we make, whether we're visual artists or writers or journalists or filmmakers, is a projection of where we were born, what's been withheld or lavished upon us, our color, our sex, our class. And everything we do in life to some degree is a reflection of that context.