Masterpiece Quotes - page 3
I come to a performance of music that I know very well as if I were performing it for the first time. Every day is a new day, a new experience. This is the way I approach a masterpiece. A masterpiece can never age - it's only the people who perform it or listen to it who become insensitive to it. If you come with a fresh feeling toward a masterpiece, it will always feel fresh and give you the benefit of its genius.
Lorin Maazel
One can do such lovely things with so little. Subjects that are too beautiful end by appearing theatrical – take Switzerland, for example. Think of all the beautiful little things Corot did at Gisors; two willows, a little water, a bridge, like the picture in the Universal Exhibition. What a masterpiece!.. .Everything is beautiful, all that matters is to be able to interpret.
Camille Pissarro
.. I will endeavour to make clear to men of good will what the word 'material' means with regard to painting and that, without the material substance of paint, a painting is not a work of art but merely a decorative object, or rather, if it deals with an invented painting, the value of the image resides in its spiritual content.
In order to be a work of art, a painting must be very well painted and the good quality of the paint depends completely on the material substance of the paint with which it is executed. This matter, which constitutes the substance of painting, is composed of two elements which are equally important and absolutely inseparable: physical substance and metaphysical substance. These two elements complete each other reciprocally and when they are of a superior quality, create a masterpiece by way of their absolute harmony.
Giorgio de Chirico
The offer to direct an animated version of Blue Dragon came in February of last year [2006]. Studio Pierrot approached me regarding it. I knew that Sakaguchi had been working on assembling staff to produce a game, although at the time Blue Dragon hadn't yet been formally announced. According to the materials, it was to be a fantasy world like Lord of the Rings, with a detailed world view and story. This may be my final anime, I'm a little worried (about it). There's incredible pressure, but at the same time, there's a sense of accomplishment - that it's worth doing. Blue Dragon will be a masterpiece, not simply because I'm working hard on it, but because the staff is expecting nothing less.
Akira Toriyama
Blue Velvet contains scenes of such raw emotional energy that it's easy to understand why some critics have hailed it as a masterpiece. A film this painful and wounding has to be given special consideration. And yet those scenes of stark sexual despair are the tipoff to what's wrong with the movie. They're so strong that they deserve to be in a movie that is sincere, honest and true. But Blue Velvet surrounds them with a story that's marred by sophomoric satire and cheap shots. The director is either denying the strength of his material or trying to defuse it by pretending it's all part of a campy in-joke. ... What's worse? Slapping somebody around, or standing back and finding the whole thing funny?
Roger Ebert
Tell a dream, lose a reader, said Henry James. Joyce told a dream, Finnegans Wake, and he told it in puns - cornily but rightly regarded as the lowest form of wit. This showed fantastic courage, and fantastic introversion. The truth is Joyce didn't love the reader, as you need to do. Well, he gave us Ulysses, incontestably the central modernist masterpiece; it is impossible to conceive of any future novel that might give the form such a violent evolutionary lurch. You can't help wondering, though. Joyce could have been the most popular boy in school, the funniest, the cleverest, the kindest. He ended with a more ambiguous distinction: he became the teacher's pet.
Martin Amis