I went to school at the San Francisco Art Institute, thinking I was going to become an art teacher. Within the first six months I was there, I was told that I couldn't be an art teacher unless I became an artist first.

At Cornell, my acting teacher said you cannot be religious and be an artist. I sort of got it, because faith is a comfort and art comes from a lot of places, in a lot of people, from the dark chasm.

My mother is a special education teacher but also an artist, and my father an advertising executive. They are about as wacky as you can get without being alcoholics.

For me, university was a bit of a rebellious streak. I love teachers but I'm inherently a bit of an anarchist and don't trust you because you're my teacher. Somewhere around my second or third year, I realized as an artist that it's up to us to choose our path, and there's nothing wrong with being given many different tools to put in your tool bag.

Something happened when I was in elementary school. A Disney artist named Bruce McIntyre retired, and he had done drawings for 'Pinocchio' and 'Snow White' that was just classic stuff. He moved to the town I grew up in, Carlsbad, and he became a part-time art teacher at our elementary school.

Barton Fink is just too self-important as an artist to get much sympathy.

All art is an intensely vulnerable gesture, and it is made with no small amounts of risk, and fear. So, I have plenty of sympathy for self-defense mechanisms, especially among artists.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.

Whatever obstacle comes your way, you gotta be prepared to jump over it! And I think that's what separates the legends from the regular artists. It's all in how you manage that success, and how you deal with the controversy when it actually comes.

We are raising today's children in sterile, risk-averse and highly structured environments. In so doing, we are failing to cultivate artists, pioneers and entrepreneurs, and instead cultivating a generation of children who can follow the rules in organized sports games, sit for hours in front of screens and mark bubbles on standardized tests.

American sports are quite masculine. And football - although it's still played by men all over the world - football compared to American football is quite feminine in its artistry. And there's no padding. It's America's loss, though.

I think about that 'empty' space a lot. That emptiness is what allows for something to actually evolve in a natural way. I've had to learn that over the years - because one of the traps of being an artist is to always want to be creating, always wanting to produce.

If you dig deep and keep peeling the onion, artists and freelance writers are the leaders in society - the people who start to get new ideas out.

My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

Generally, when a record label suggests album ideas for you, you smile politely, and then proceed to shoot it down, because it's never what you as an artist feel is right for you.

By coincidence and not design, 'Everstar' is written and drawn by an all-female creative team, and it makes me smile to think that there may be young female readers out there, future writers and artists, who get to see that comics doesn't have to be a 'boys' club.'

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors.

I don't buy art just to make artists happy any more than I want to make them sad if I sell their work.

Film-makers are always going to be interested in making movies that plug into society around them. That's what a vibrant, artistically alert community should be doing. After all, it would be sad if we only made films about alien robots.

It always makes me sad when I think of how I saw Wagner wasting his vitality, not only by singing their parts to some of his artists, but acting out the smallest details, and of how few they were who were responsive to his wishes.

You see so many artists who are so talented end up living sad, empty lives. This industry takes so much out of you that without the accountability and leaving God in the center, you can be left so empty and void.

Country fans need to support country music by buying albums and concert tickets for traditional artists or the music will just fade away. And that would be really sad.

As a solo artist, it's so easy to be lumped into a singer / songwriter genre and writing sleepy, sad songs that are very emotionally rich that mean a lot to you, and people just get kind of tired.