I am at war… with the principal personage of traditional philosophy, that abstract subject who masquerades as everyone and anyone, but is really a male subject in disguise.
I don’t like to move abstract theoretical policies that, on a white paper, sound good. If I wanted to do that, I’d be a professor.
I don’t want any of my records to sound like one style throughout. That’s why I choose different grooves and songs: tunes that are sensitive and slow as well as pieces that are abstract and fast. The approach I want to take with my records is to give the listener a variety of grooves, concepts, and composers.
If members of Congress were to vote to allow a military action, they might then share the blame if the mission were to go wrong. So they demand in the abstract that presidents ask their approval for going to war but in practice prefer to let presidents bear the burden alone.
The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism – Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on!
Decarbonising our energy system is not some abstract regulatory requirement. It is an essential responsibility that we hold towards our children and grandchildren as the only way to effectively counter the threat of climate change.
Housing insecurity isn’t just an abstract point of policy for me. I’ve lived it.
Sometimes I have these abstract ideas and then lose track of myself.
A lot of these angles are really about trying to mimic broadcast sports angles in order to anchor the scene, to sort of normalize it before it becomes abstracted.
The way in which people talk about climate is just so wonky and so abstract and such a boys’ club that it makes a lot of women just roll their eyes or feel that they are somehow not qualified. I certainly had to fight that feeling in myself in order to write about it.
No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow – and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.
Wikipedians believe (and I do, too) that bits, being abstract, will outlast paper.
I create art. It’s kinda abstract.
Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.
It is difficult to talk about fashion in the abstract, without a human body before my eyes, without drawings, without a choice of fabric – without a practical or visual reality.
I personally don’t care for abstract art. I have always felt, ‘To each his own.’ There’s art out there for everybody.
The Kevin Abstract project kind of represents being socially awkward in high school, which I’m low-key kind of tired of.
There are all kinds of features that will become part of cell phones that will help us offload the more laborious things of life and let us focus on doing the things humans do well, like abstract thinking and creating.
The easiest way for me to tell someone what I do is to say that I’m a non-musician who practises and produces music. I don’t have a theoretical language for music. I have this abstract dream language.
Part of what I love about games is that, even if you’re best friends with somebody, it gives you these sort of moments where you get to interact on a completely different level. You all agree to these abstract rules, but there’s nobody holding a gun to your head.
How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.
There’s no way that scientists can ever rule out religion, or even have anything significant to say about the abstract idea of a divine creator.
The things I talk about and explain couldn’t happen – yet, they don’t seem impossible – you could say I talk about the world in an abstract perspective. But then, the world is basically insane – and it’s trying to pass itself off as being a sane place. I show it for what it is.
Balanchine was just able to strike the balance between literal narrative and abstract dance.
When I was growing up, nothing unpleasant was shown in the home. And when I was in art school, the only art that was presented to me was Abstract Expressionism. But I was interested in the grim stuff. It seemed more exciting.
There is certainly a part of my filmmaking that harkens to a more simpler commercial kind of taste, but then with this there’s certainly a kind of avant-garde, abstract, existential element to it.
Much has been written about Trump’s style of speech, which linguists have said is often unintelligible yet deeply compelling. Orwell’s famous 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language,’ centers on the use of abstract words, often by politicians, to obscure reality.
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past.
The language of film is further and further away from the language of theater and is closer to music. It’s abstract but still narrative.
People who have grown up in a world where this was not a concern and suddenly start hearing about climate change – it’s very difficult. It’s a very, very abstract concept. So we need to work on making it very educational and very, very clear, in very simple terms.
When friends and lovers die and your world gets quieter; that’s when the silence comes closer; that’s when next isn’t the least bit theoretical or abstract.
American government did not originate in any abstract theories about liberty and equality, but in the actual experience gained by generation after generation of English colonists in managing their own political affairs. The Revolution did not make a breach in the continuity of their institutional life.
Music is so abstract; it is a combination of words and melody.
I think they should have movies in restaurants. I can’t believe that so many people get together just to sit there. It’s so abstract… isn’t it abstract? What are these people sitting here watching?
To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
Music is very abstract. When we talk about music, we’re not discussing the music itself but rather how we react to it.
A trilogy is a pretty abstract notion. You can apply it to almost any three things.
I’m a teacher, so much of what I’m doing remains in the abstract. But I also support a lot of educational initiatives that support kids to really get out there and work hard in their communities. But I also think that we need poets in our country to inspire.
I want kids to live through this character I’ve created. I want them to say that they are Kevin Abstract because they relate to it that much.
A lot of my books have started with an abstract premise.
Voting is like alchemy – taking an abstract value and breathing life into it.
Politics is a literal game. Every word must represent a strict view – or be so abstract as to be meaningless.
I wanted to be a painter, somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Pop.
We shall suffer no attachment to literature, no taste for abstract discussion, no love of purely intellectual theories, to seduce us from our devotion to the cause of the oppressed, the down trodden, the insulted and injured masses of our fellow men.
I’m not a natural leader. I’m too intellectual; I’m too abstract; I think too much.
When I used to do abstract paintings at school, like everyone else, the tutor said these would make great curtains. I would always neglect the formal stuff that was going on by using colour, because colour kind of came naturally to me.
Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division; and from the antagonism between poor and rich means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts.
For people of color – especially African Americans – the idea that racist cops might frame members of their community is no abstract notion, let alone an exercise in irrational conspiracy theorizing. Rather, it speaks to a social reality about which blacks are acutely aware.
To move the picture into our surroundings and give it real existence has been my ideal since I came to abstract painting.
I am dominated by one thing, an irresistible, burning attraction towards the abstract.
I was worried in the ’80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.
You make knowledge relevant to life and you make it important for children to learn things that will really relate to things going on in their lives, and not abstract.
I was literally told for ‘The Show Goes On’ that I shouldn’t rap too deep. I shouldn’t be too lyrical. It just needs to be something easy on the eyes. Like a record company telling Picasso that we don’t need these abstract interpretations of life, where people have to sit down and look at it and break it down.
I’ve always written about people who have very abstracted in a certain way. I write about scientists and artists and musicians. I write about people who live in their heads who are very obsessed about a certain set of details in the physical world.
