I dropped out of high school three days into my senior year because I hated it because New York City public school is a mess. I certainly wasn’t one for sitting in a classroom. Then I went off to college to North Carolina School of the Arts, then quit that after two years.
My entire life, I’ve always known that I wanted to be a performer, but I didn’t know exactly how, where or when. I never learned or studied the craft, formally. I grew up doing martial arts and playing piano. But, something inside of me always said that I was going to do this, as far back as I can remember.
I think that’s one of the greatest gifts you get if you’re successful at something like music or film or photography – any of the arts – you can sit there and think. It’s so much fun to sit there and think and wonder about the world and the universe.
You perhaps know me as a novelist. Literature is one of the arts – in fact, the noblest of the arts. That is not my opinion; it was first expressed by the ancients. As art, literature has many similarities with the other art forms.
I have a Bachelor of Arts in English, which means I had a lot of formal training in reading.
I think there is a debate in the arts about, you know, whether we must strive for art for art’s sake, and you know, kind of try to keep political debate out of our work. And to that I say, I’d like you to show me an example of, you know, this so-called apolitical art. I don’t think there’s any such thing.
France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.
I was raised doing martial arts.
I have done martial arts my whole life, so it comes easily, but I have never done proper sword fighting.
I grew up in a wood cabin on Puget Sound in Manchester, Wash. My family taught me to appreciate the arts and the outdoors, and I still yearn for the absolute silence I experienced there when I was young.
Best fight ever in a movie: ‘They Live.’ I want to do a martial arts version of that, where you think it’s ended, and it just keeps on going. I love that fight. It was funny as well. Unexpected.
I’d want to read the stories that I’d written, I’d want to show the drawings that I made. That was just purely natural. So I knew I wanted to go into the arts in some way and that I’d want to show that work in some way.
Work out really hard and be confident because bodies are beautiful, sensual and natural. I’ve also trained in Wushu, a form of martial arts – it’s very beautiful and flowy, and it’s predominantly used in fight scenes in movies, which is how it was introduced to me, and I just love it.
People think that the arts are optional and they aren’t. They teach a level of emotional depth that’s equally important to mathematic skill. You can replace some math skills with a calculator if you know how to operate the thing, but there’s no calculator for human interaction.
I think the problem with the arts in America is how unimportant it seems to be in our educational system.
We all must support the arts, as it is our culture. It makes us better people. It makes us happy; it gives us empathy and shows us how to live. It is so important.
I don’t have to have any special skills or martial arts in my back pocket.
You cannot please all of the people all of the time, and that is truer in the arts than anywhere else.
People have had certain assumptions in the past about Conservative governments, partly because of some of the things that happened in the 1980s, and partly because of the tone of some of the debate in the 1980s that appeared to say public spending on the arts was something you might want to progressively reduce.
Movies are visual, aural, they involve people, and life, and ideas and art, they are so elastic. They can hold anything, withstand everything, and make you feel anything. Other arts can do that, but movies are the only ones that can incorporate other media into cinema.
The present government is very insistent that business sponsorship should replace government sponsorship of the arts. Business sponsorship won’t happen unless you make tax concessions, which they won’t.
The arts are a celebration of life.
America’s liberal arts universities have long been safe zones for leftist thinking, protected ivory towers for the pseudo-elite who earn their livings writing papers nobody reads about gender roles in the poetry of Maya Angelou.
Everyone wants instant everything, and they want instant success, but I always think you should treat things in the arts like a garden, and let them grow.
I’m anti-ageism in the arts.
Culture cannot be separated from politics. The arts, philosophy and metaphysics, religion and the sciences, constitute culture. Politics are the science or art of organizing our relationships to allow for the development of life in society.
France, mother of arts, of warfare, and of laws.
I was always interested in the arts as a child – drawing, painting, and piano – but acting became a favourite. I was a major theatre geek in high school – if I wasn’t in the drama room at lunch rehearsing, I’d be in the art room finishing up some type of project.
Bottom line, I have to follow what my soul says, or my spirit. And my spirit said that poetry and the arts should be without borders, should be without political borders.
Toronto is a special city, and the environment is perfect for the arts; free and alive. I’m a New Yorker, and Toronto reminds me of a much cleaner New York, so it’s like coming home after your mom just cleaned your room for you; for me that’s a lovely environment.
When I was a kid, I had two great guilty pleasures. One was horror movies and the other was martial arts movies.
More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.
As I grew older, I actually was prepared to go into fine arts school and do a degree. That was what I was actually settled upon when I was offered a record deal.
Cage’s Music of Changes was a further indication that the arts in general were beginning to consciously deal with the ‘given’ material and, to varying degrees, liberating them from the inherited, functional concepts of control.
Storage problems make neon signs the most ephemeral of commercial arts.
Science provides an understanding of a universal experience. Arts provide a universal understanding of a personal experience.
How do you rebel in a family of rebels? That’s the age-old question. I guess I could have by not going into the arts, but the thing is, I couldn’t do anything else.
There’s a reason that there are oodles of young Aussies, Germans, Japanese, even Chinese backpackers traipsing around the world. They are unencumbered by debilitating student loans. No such luck for the American Theater Arts major with $120,000 in loans.
Train hard, get good coaching, and don’t forget that its mixed martial arts. Don’t get tied into one style of fighting, and focus on multiple disciplines.
It’s the same with visual arts, you have some really cool, wonderful striking images that make you think and then again you have wonderful striking images that just take you away from the existing world for a second. And I like the latter a bit more.
The ability to recognize opportunities and move in new – and sometimes unexpected – directions will benefit you no matter your interests or aspirations. A liberal arts education is designed to equip students for just such flexibility and imagination.
We believed that there’s no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it’s bad, it’s something else. It was a much, much harder line in the ’50s and ’60s than it is now, because the idea of art education didn’t exist – they didn’t have a fine arts program when I was a kid.
The arts are an integral part of the city’s economic progress.
School work and intellectual interests such as music and the arts were not especially important to me while I was growing up, although mathematics, my favorite subject, was fun. Baseball was my first passion: I played sand lot and Little League and rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
‘Be passionate about your work and your life’ was instilled in me by my mother Dada, who was a potter. She also introduced me to the arts and encouraged me to embrace the new.
The Ohio State University has a rich – if quiet – heritage of the arts.
I asked the man on the phone from the National Endowment for the Arts what this fellowship entailed, and he said, ‘Well, first there’s $10,000.’ I asked him, ‘Can I pay it in installments?’
British innovation in design, in the creative arts, in engineering and manufacturing is world class.
Boston was a great city to grow up in, and it probably still is. We were surrounded by two very important elements: academia and the arts. I was surrounded by theater, music, dance, museums. And I learned how to sail on the Charles River. So I had a great childhood in Boston. It was wonderful.
All the arts are predominantly national, and therefore the Australian Film Commission should be funding us. The battle gets more and more vicious each year.
My dad was dean of fine arts at the university. I was casting bronzes in the school foundry. I was using the university as a playground.
Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.
