Art Interviews

“I always want to take a human portrait. My goal in life is always to enter into everything with great care and with great humanity.”

“The success of translating an idea into action is very often where the talent is to be found. If you can give a body to the idea, I think you are onto a very interesting process.”

“You’ve got to actually write it. You’ve got to actually sit there and do it, it can’t just be about the experience. Lots of people have fantastic experiences in life, but don’t have any inclination to put pen to paper.”

“If it sounds right, then I’m happy, no matter how I got there. I just want to make beautiful music.”

“There’s only one of you in the world. No one else is like you and that's a superpower.”

“There's going to be a moment where your work challenges you, where you’re at your limit… But if that deep love is really there, you're not going to abandon it. You are going to give your all to it!”

“I think I will stop working when I am finally satisfied… And I cannot see that in the foreseeable future. The urge to do better and even better than that is what pushes me forward.”

“I think the best you can do for yourself is let your subconscious drive you, instead of doing things because you want to achieve some sort of glory.”

“If I pass away one day, I am happy because I tried to do my best. My sport allowed me to do so much.”

“You don’t think of your roles as achievements. You think of the roles you play, the paintings you’ve made. I mean, imagine an actor saying, “I don’t want to go on anymore because I can’t do better than the last movie I made. I might as well quit now.” We’d call that resting on your laurels.”

“The first song that I wrote was the way of discovering if I could write a song. And after that one I knew that I understood the form. Everything after that became more personal.”

“It’s still astounding to me that I have one Oscar, let alone two. Especially because it’s by-product of something that you love so much, it feels like that’s already the gift, that’s already the award.”

“It's important for a novelist to use the imagination like a musician, a composer or a painter would, in a kind of non-logical way. I think it’s very important for me to not just become a kind of intellectual writer.”

“As a photographer, as long as I remain truthful with myself in the transaction, as long as I maintain a level of empathy for my humanity in that process, then what is being translated back is honest and the transaction is not objectified.”

“I think that one should make a house that really fits you like your second soul. It should be your most preferred place on earth!”

“I am Valentino. I live in my own world. I love to create clothes, I love beautiful things. If they want to call me an icon, okay, then I am an icon.”

“When you keep yourself open, you just might get to know yourself and know the good things about yourself. And that's why I always come back to songwriting. It's the way I kind of try and make sense of my life.”

“I don’t want to continue to do what I did when I was 20. I would like to continue to develop myself .”

“To fight this game alone is actually every day a struggle. Sometimes you are not in the best shape. The biggest thing is that you must find in it a personal happiness.”

“I’m doing something that I love, and I consider that to be success. But if you think it’s gonna come fast or easy, then you probably are in for some rough times. You need to always be ready to throw things out and do it over again, and know that you love the process enough to be doing it repeatedly. Always be in love with the process and in love with your talent. And know that you’re going to keep doing it because it’s what you love doing.”

“Filmmaking is never anything less than a beautiful gift. I've been doing this forever, and as hard as it may be, it's never let me down. I have such a will to make these movies!”

“You can’t measure something like who is the best chef in the world. Whether I’m the best or not, no one can really say. However, my restaurant elBulli was certainly the most influential restaurant in the world.”

“People have said that before, “Oh, I'll read a recipe and know it's yours before I see your name on it.” That's the best compliment because I feel like working with food is such an extension of my personality.”

“You better make every moment count. Live your life now; start in the morning. You mustn’t sit around waiting to die.”

“I do not consider architecture as art, nor do I consider architects to be artists. However, I do have a strong desire to improve the purity of my expression and put a strong message into my architecture so that I can call it art!”

“For the first 20 years in my career all I did was add things; more courses, more silverware, more ingredients, adding, adding, adding. Only like three years ago or so I was able to really start focusing on removing and felt confident to do so. I finally created a dish where for the first time I felt like I achieved what I tried to do for 23 years.”

“My goal when I’m in front of an audience is to perform the piece and fill it with meaning. On stage, I concentrate on rationality and empathy, since the singer must feel a certain amount of emotion, but not too much.”

“I am very grateful for the films I’ve made. I’ve been able to make movies for $1 million and I’ve been able to make movies for $195 million. I can do what I want in different sizes for different reasons. I have been able to do 10 more movies than I thought I would ever make!”

“You can catch ideas at a deeper level when you start meditating. Intuition grows, and intuition is the number one tool for an artist – feeling and thinking combined. The ideas are flowing, and the feeling that you can get it to feel correct. You know what that is. It’s a knowingness that grows. It’s really beautiful.”

“I think we've all lived through the pandemic and it has awakened in all of us a concept of time, and how fleeting our time is and can be... I want to apply my energy doing good and creating and hopefully not squandering that. That's what I live for.”

“I feel quite free as an artist. I don't feel that I have to prove anything. It’s a liberating feeling. I can go in any directions, I can explore and embrace whatever I want.”

“I don’t pander to anybody. I don’t care who it is. I just do the picture I do.”

“when we finally put a piece together for the first time, seeing it all together, when it actually works… The excitement in the room is something I’ll never forget. It feels like a very powerful moment to be part of.”

“I can’t make people happy if I’m not happy myself. That applies to anyone who tries to achieve something in their life: if you’re not happy, you can’t transfer any happiness”

“I want to be an authentic person. I start to feel that it’s a mission. I am not going to hold back on an opinion I have about something; I don’t know what the point of that would be.”

“The guys who are real artists are people who have figured out the art of living; their art is art because they live. They have made living an art, they have made an art of living. They are constantly inputting life as opposed to expressing life.”

“I consider myself a storyteller. I feel that is what good directors do, they are really just following criteria: is this a good story? Is this the story I want to tell? All we’re trying to do is the hard task of making interesting, thought-provoking films.”

“I would like to think that someday I will be content enough with myself and feel good enough about myself to think I don’t need to do all that sort of shit and I’ll just go and watch tomatoes grow or something.”

“I struggled a lot. That was the reason I became a champion. A lot of people give up, a lot of people feel sorry for themselves. But I didn't.”

“To have those magical moments, the ones that require real trust or bravery or letting go, you’ve really gotta swing for the rafters! You’ve got to try and hit it out the park — although you might miss. You’re always trying to hit it into the rafters, and damn the consequences if you don’t make it.”