“I've come to the realisation that I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing half the time”
"Sermon From the Savoy", New Musical Express (29 September 1984)
Context: I'm terribly intuitive—I always thought I was intellectual about what I do, but I've come to the realisation that I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing half the time, that the majority of the stuff that I do is totally intuitive, totally about where I am physically and mentally at any moment in time and I have a far harder time than anybody else explaining it and analysing it. That's the territory of the artist anyway: to be quite at sea with what he does, and working towards not being intuive about it and being far more methodical and academic about it.
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David Bowie 105
British musician, actor, record producer and arranger 1947–2016Related quotes
Amanda Collier Ridley, Chapter 11, p. 171
2009, The Best of Me (2011)
“I fail to do
What I'm trying
I've been these walls
And everyone who dies
Hears other times”
In Rime
Lyrics, To Record Only Water for Ten Days (2000)
Interview with Conrad Bodman, curator at the Barbican Arts Centre (2001)
Context: Ideas must be put to the test. That's why we make things, otherwise they would be no more than ideas. There is often a huge difference between an idea and its realisation. I've had what I thought were great ideas that just didn't work. Sometimes it's difficult to say if something has worked or not. Photography is a way of putting distance between myself and the work which sometimes helps me to see more clearly what it is that I have made.
Explaining how he came to follow the race for the discovery of the Higgs boson from the sidelines, as quoted by Ian Sample, in The god of small things, The Guardian, Saturday 17 November 2007.
Biography - John Wayne Gacy: Monster in Disguise. A & E Home Video, 2000.
“I'm a slave to this leaf in a diary that lists what I must do, what I must say, every half hour.”
Fallaci interview (1973)
Letter to F.W Weber (1950); published in New York—Pennsylvania Collector (8 August 1991)
Context: How do ideas come? What a question! If they come of their own accord, they are apt to arrive at the most unexpected time and place. For the most part the place is out of doors, for up in this northern wilderness when nature puts on a show it is an inspiring one. There seem to be magic days once in a while, with some rare quality of light that hold a body spellbound: In sub-zero weather there will be a burst of unbelievable color when the mountain turns a deep purple, a thing it refuses to do in summer. Then comes the hard part: how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, air and space, there is no such thing as sitting down outside and trying to make a “portrait” of it. It lasts for only a minute, for one thing, and it isn’t an inspiration that can be copied on the spot...