Peter Brotzmann quotes

“And if you look around, if you listen to some music nowdays, I'm not so optimistic...I have the feeling that some of the young people I've met they think already, before they start playing, they think already about the product: how can we sell it....maybe my view is really very old fashioned nowadays, but I think art at any times needs time for development and this fast food bullshit is not working... younger guys: take your time, music is really a thing of long terms, actually it's a lifelong thing to learn and to develop your own stuff.”
-- Peter Brotzmann

#Music Quotes #Art Quotes #Optimistic Quotes

“The more I compose, the more I know that I don't know it all. I think it's a good way to start. If you think you know it all, the work becomes a repetition of what you've already done.”

“I was in New York, miserable because I was working supper clubs but I wasn't expressing myself. I was really unhappy with my life. I saw Max Roach again and he told me I didn't have to do things like that. He made me an honest woman on the stage. I have been performing in that tradition since. I feel that I'm a serious performer now whereas then I wanted to be but I didn't know how.”

“Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process.”

Source : A. Bartlett Giamatti (1981). “The University and the Public Interest”, Atheneum Books

“Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.”

“To Lawren Harris art was almost a mission. He believed that a country which ignored the arts left no record of itself worth preserving.”

“Art, however innocent, looks like deceiving.”

“The traditional difficulty of balancing the mechanical with the imaginative schools of photography still operates. In schools of photography meaningful art education is often lacking and on the strength of their technical ability alone students, deprived of a richer artistic training, are sent forth inculcated with the belief that they are creative photographers and artists. It is yet a fact that today, as in the past, the most inspiring and provocative works in photography come as much (and probably more) from those who are in the first place artists.”

“Life is beautiful. You have to be thankful that we are living. Wherever you look is beauty. I know about the bad things, but I look for the good things.”

“I was born optimistic...I was laughing from the beginning of my life.”

“I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”

Source : Antonio Gramsci (2011). “Letters from Prison”, p.299, Columbia University Press