The way I write my songs is that I have to believe what I'm writing about, and that's why they always end up being so personal - because the kind of artists I like, they convince me, they totally win me over straight away in that thing. Like, 'Oh my ...
Oh God, it's such a big world right now for artists. There are as many possibilities as you can have time for, getting your music out there with the internet, and Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook, and everything that you have, there is a way to spread the wo...
We've been surrounded by images of space our whole lives, from the speculative images of science fiction to the inspirational visions of artists to the increasingly beautiful pictures made possible by complex technologies. But whilst we have an overw...
I concentrate, more than I think virtually any comic book artist has in the past, on the so-called mundane details of every day life - quotidian life. What happens to a person during a working day, marital relations, and stuff like that.
Billions of photos are shot every year, and about the toughest thing a photographer can do is invent an original, deeply personal, instantly recognizable visual style. In the early nineties, Wolfgang Tillmans did just that, transforming himself into ...
You start to become successful, and everybody starts to drive your money train to the bank, and they're not thinking anymore about what you want as an artist or if any of that even matters to you. It genuinely upsets people in my life that I don't ca...
Most of the time, the artists are not supposed to wear the fashion. It is always seen as a vanity. But I think I don't need to prove anything in my life. I can honestly say I love fashion and I can be many things at the same time.
Music is a vital part of my life, and it has been since I was a kid. It helped me find my identity as a person, it helped me find my identity as an artist, and it helped me get in touch with emotions that I didn't know I had.
I look at the Samurai because they were the artists of their time. What I think struck me when I read Bushido is compassion. 'If there's no one there to help, go out and find someone to help.' That hit me, because I try to lead my life like that.
I am honestly very intimidated when I meet new people and they expect me to be the onscreen Vir. On stage, I say a lot of things I might never say in real life; I am never the life of the party. People are quite surprised to see that I am more of a q...
I'm sure I would have been considered a more significant artist if I was a singer-songwriter. It's just not the way I roll. I love being a curator and a musicologist. People write me letters and thank me for turning them on to Fred McDowell and Sippi...
Working on the Obama campaign was a life-changer for me. I realized during that campaign that structure is the name of the game, and so, soon after the election, filmmaker Adam Baran and I started Queer/Art/Film, a monthly series at the IFC Film Cent...
New York has always had a love for Southern artists. There's no place else that makes me feel like the city does. I just love the immediate nature of the city, you can get whatever you want whenever you want it and do whatever you want whenever you w...
When the show opens, fans can text to a number we flash up on the screen, and then we do a meet-and-greet with 60 to 80 people every night. It's something I love doing, and I would say that's probably more fans than most artists bring backstage after...
I was at Pepperdine University in Malibu, and during my sophomore year, I played a dying burn victim on 'ER.' The makeup artist put burn makeup all over my body and I couldn't move or eat for 12 hours. I lost 8 pounds that week.
Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration… tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those ...
Born Berlin 1931, Germany, father a British diplomat, mother an American artist. Educated at various schools all over the world. 1958 Settled down to live in London. 1966 Became interested in photography through photographing my young children. No fo...
The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of a...
Here in this supreme menace of the will, there approaches a redeeming, healing, enchantress—art. She alone can turn these thoughts of repulsion at the horror and absurdity of existence into ideas compatible with life: these are the sublime—the ta...
Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.
Even if you're playing the most well-known repertoire under the sun, I still believe you have a responsibility as an artist to tell the audience why you're playing it, what are the key aspects to it, and then throw in a bit about its historical conte...
