Abstract Quotes - Page 29

• I love theater, a performance and designing a visual spectacle. It is like creating a composition with clothes, which have to fit the psychology as well as the body of characters. The performance is frozen in time, the clothes have to stay reliable and help to define the story. Fashion can be much more abstract. It needs no story because the woman is the story. She supplies the text and content. Fashion for retail is the opposite of frozen, it has to change and morph constantly to stay relevant - to be the "fashion.".

  Isabel Toledo

  Fashion, Character, Design

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think people feel very comfortable reviewing the idea of me, as opposed to what I've actually written. Most of the time, when people write about one of my books, they're really just writing about what they think I may or may not represent, as sort of this abstract entity. Is that unfair? Not really. If I put myself in this position where I'm going to kind of weave elements of memoir into almost everything, well, I suppose that's going to happen.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.avclub.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I want the pictures to be working in both directions. I accept that they speak about me, and yet at the same time, I want and expect them to function in terms of the viewer and their experience. With these abstract pictures, although the eye recognizes them as photographic rather than painted, the eye also tries to connect them to reality. There's always this association machine working in the brain, and that is why it is important to me that they are actually photographic and not painted.

  Wolfgang Tillmans

  Eye, Reality, Brain

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The original interest in making pictures that don't directly depict came around '97 or '98, when I felt there was such an acceleration of images in the world, and that was before Flickr and so on. So I felt a need to slow down how one consumes photographs. With the abstract pictures, I was engaged in trying to find new images, but in practice, it was a bit like throwing a wrench in the spokes. The omnipresence of photography is at a level that it has never been in the history of the world. I feel really curious to now reengage and see what the camera can do for me.

  Wolfgang Tillmans

  Photography, Trying, World

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I love monsters. If I go to a church, I'm more interested in the gargoyles than the saints. I really don't care much about the idea of normal - that's very abstract to me. I think that perfection is practically unattainable but imperfection is right at hand. So that's why I love monsters: because they represent a side of us we should actually embrace and celebrate.

  Guillermo del Toro

  Thinking, Perfection, Church

  Source: www.theguardian.com

  26 Copy quote

  Show source

• Wisdom in groups emerges as a product of commitments we make with ourselves and to each other. These stances are not abstract rules but tangible practices that must be renewed each time we are in groups. They are essentially commitments and attitudes that foster collaboration and positive collective action.

  Alan Briskin

  Attitude, Commitment, Collaboration

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I don't have to think too hard to keep my writing within a certain narrative thread. That happens because certain words trigger other associations you have in your mind. So, there is this inherent narrative in the end, whether it is abstract or what.

  Luke Temple

  Writing, Thinking, Mind

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Jazz musicians like John Coltrane needed these very clear titles for their abstract music, and your decision to bring voices into your music as a way to tap into content. It's related to the way my text-based work still functions as abstraction for me. If I repeat a sentence down a canvas, the text starts to smudge and disappear. It essentially becomes an abstract piece. The meaning of the text is still there.

  Glenn Ligon

  Decision, Musician, Jazz

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I loathe when architects only analyze architecture in intellectual, nonvisual ways. I really love direct response, and that's very pop. I don't want to discuss abstract transparencies with a bunch of kooks.

  Peter Marino

  Intellectual, Architecture, Transparency

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I don't know if embarrassed is the right word, about pop, but I prefer the abstract and the distorted in music. And I keep writing these proper melodies and harmonies, and they're the bits that get thrown out of the records! And I have quite a collection.

  Jason Pierce

  Writing, Harmony, Embarrassed

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In an odd way I thought I was lowering the bar for myself, in saying, well, I'll make a pop album. But in a way it's kind of harder to make pop music. It's like the more abstract you get with music, you get into that emperor's new clothes thing, where you can go anywhere, and just claim that your audience may not be prepared to go with you. But with pop music, I think everybody understands the form, everybody knows what it's meant to do. So I would say it's harder to write that kind of music.

  Jason Pierce

  Writing, Thinking, Kind

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Life holds many, many, many mysteries, abstract things we all think about. In a film when things get abstract, some people don't appreciate that and they want to leave the theater. Others love to dream, get lost, try to figure things out. I'm one of those people. I like a film, a story that holds concrete things but also abstractions. So when ideas come along that have those things, I'm falling in love and going to work.

  David Lynch

  Dream, Falling In Love, Thinking

  Source: www.wbur.org

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Let me see: art and activism. I can always fall back on, "the question should be, what isn't political? Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly." I think so much of art is unconscious anyway, the artist doesn't know the real reason they're doing it. They're just kind of going along with it intuitively.

  Eric Drooker

  Art, Real, Fall

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We know how to work certain toys, and if you've got something in your head you know how to get in on tape, even if it's got an abstract sound to it. We are kind of producers as well as a band, so we're a self-contained unit. We can produce our own record as well as write it.

  Jez Williams

  Writing, Kind, Producers

  Source: pitchfork.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Corruption is a fact of life in America as in Afganistan, but as American citizens, if we are white, we tend to experience it as an opportunity cost. I live in Washington, DC, where the city council is notoriously corrupt. But how do I experience that? Maybe in streets that are not as well paved as they could be, maybe in a bridge that costs a lot more money than it should have. That's a little bit abstract - shocking, of course - but still abstract.

  Sarah Chayes

  Opportunity, Corruption, Facts Of Life

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The subjects in my work appear as unidentified ghosts that can't be said to be of this world. I've decided to call them incarnations. In various religions, myths, and legends, the word "incarnation" refers to the birth or emergence of transcendent beings in the form of humans or other bodies. If "incarnation" denotes the appearance of an abstract being in some concrete form, in a gut ceremony, a shaman could be considered an incarnation of our desires, hopes, and sorrows. The incarnations that appear in my work are always new and I meet them for the first time by drawing them.

  Hyon Gyon

  Sorrow, Desire, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the documentary impulse, two species of 'fact' exist side by side: one is coolly objective and the other is fraught, diverse and emotive; one figurative, the other abstract; one prosaic, the other poetic; one factual, the other romantic.

  Stuart Franklin

  Poetic, Impulse, Diverse

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Some people in China don't look at freedom of speech as an abstract ideal, but more as a means to an end.

  Yiyun Li

  Mean, People, Freedom Of Speech

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We do have to learn poetry at school. Poetry is interesting to me, particularly Chinese poetry. It's like an ancient form of song. There's five sentences, seven sentences - they're very different from English poetry. Chinese poetry is much more rigorous. You can only use this many words, and they will form some kind of rhythm so people can actually sing it. To me, poetry is quite abstract but also quite beautiful.

  Jenova Chen

  Beautiful, Song, School

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Soldiers join the military to serve their country, but when bullets are flying, it's hard to fight for an abstract notion like patriotism. They're fighting for the people standing next to them, and it doesn't matter who's a Republican or a Democrat, or who's black or white or Christian or Muslim or gay or straight. If Congress and all Americans could manage to ignore those differences, we would have a perfect country, but somehow we cannot rise to that level of nobility.

  Sebastian Junger

  Christian, Country, Military

  Source: www.oprah.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is the artist's responsibility to be the oracle, to abstract where you are - that is our responsibility - we're not there to look glamorous. We're there to tune into the frequency of the Earth and the connective tissues of those things that we are responding to - language, colour, costume, literature, poetry, cuisine, perfume - these are the things that make up the desire to throw paint on a canvas, these are the things that create the excitement for building a new language!

  Lisa Gerrard

  Responsibility, Desire, Literature

  7 Copy quote

• When I began as an artist, I already did not like expressionism, or abstract expressionism, because abstract painting had already been done. I did not want to belong to any one group or the other, and I'm not one or the other.

  Georg Baselitz

  Artist, Done, Painting

  4 Copy quote

• 'Woman on the Plaza,' with its distinct horizon, snow-like surfaces, wintry wall, stunning sunlight, sharp shadows, and hurrying figure, would become the most biographical of my photographs - an abstract image of the landscape and life of northern Ohio where I grew up and first practiced photography.

  Sam Abell

  Photography, Wall, Ohio

  10 Copy quote

• I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I'd draw a big ram's head, really messy. I'd never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman.

  Jean-Michel Basquiat

  Kids, Artist, Winning

  Jean Michel Basquiat, Rudy Chiappini (2005). “Basquiat”, Museo D'Arte Moderna Citta Di Lugano

  36 Copy quote

  Show source

• Good science fiction is intelligent. It asks big questions that are on people's minds. It's not impossible. It has some sort of root in the abstract.

  Nicolas Cage

  Intelligent, Roots, People

  "Nicolas Cage Interview - KNOWING". Press conference, collider.com. March 18, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source