I didn’t know the term ‚synesthesia‘ until I was working on ‚Cruel Summer.‘ Halfway into writing that, I really understood that, my entire life, I had been trying to describe this condition of mine: through painting, through this seven-screen Surround Vision film we shot in Qatar, through all these things.

I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

I wouldn’t call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I’ll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I’m listening to music and think, ‚Oh, there’s not enough sort of yellowy stuff in here, or not enough white.‘

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

I wouldn’t put myself forward to do a film like ‚Changeling‘ if I thought I couldn’t pull people into a story because of all the other ways people see me.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike.

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

I’d been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it’s environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this ‚ambient music.‘ But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.

The skin of my character in ‚The Man Who Fell to Earth‘ was some concoction, a spermatozoon of an alien nature that was obscene and weird-looking.

My folks always let me go to the movies every Saturday. We were really motion-picture goers.

I don’t think I’d ever apologise for music I make, no.

I like having my hands in the clay. I like the movie-making process.

As much as I love the Western genre, I figured if I kept doing those, I’d eventually run out of steam on that, and that would’ve been the end of it.

I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

If you consider film an art form, as some people do, then the Western would be a truly American art form, much as jazz is.

Sometimes I think that there’s a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Real art has been… what’s the word? Kidnapped? No, that’s not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

I always want to create and do things, or draw.

The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.

Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Colour, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.

As a Western, ‚The Magnificent Seven‘ was a pretty good film. I don’t think it was as interesting or as multi-faceted as ‚Seven Samurai.‘

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

One good thing about acting in film is that it’s good therapy.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

I think there’s a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

It is after all the greatest art to limit and isolate oneself.

You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it’s not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.

We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe.

I call architecture frozen music.

Obviously, the cinematography of films is art, just as a still shot can be art. If I’m watching a Wes Anderson movie, the colour palettes alone, and the way they’re painted, could be art. With music, you’re a little bit limited, of course, because it’s only audio.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.