Art Rock Quotes

#1. And so many of the kinds of labels you get stuck with don't really tell the story; Progressive, Art Rock, Noise Music, Downtown - it ends up being a struggle to stay out of debates that other people are having around you.

Fred Frith

#2. Maybe if they all could he combined - art, rock and fashion. Those were always my favorite things.

Stephen Sprouse

#3. There is no real way to categorize McLean's 'American Pie' for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock.

Douglas Brinkley

#4. I think Everclear is a weird combination of a singer-songwriter and a hard-rock band. That's why some people really dig the band, and some don't.

Art Alexakis

#5. Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that? I've always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then I was a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art.

Patti Smith

#6. Rock and roll cola wars, I can't take it any more.

Billy Joel

#7. Later he would say that the Church led him to God, and LSD led him to universe. He also said that art led him to the devil, and sex kept him with the devil.

Patti Smith

#8. The nice thing about growing up in that kind of environment is you were exposed to so much
music, plays, art exhibits, rock concerts.

Perrey Reeves

#9. When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.

Marc Chagall

#10. It was very hard breaking into the film industry in Britain. I had been to art school, and I was painting and doing commercials. And I did some of the very first rock videos.

Tony Scott

#11. The true art of being young is knowing how to defy gravity and upset as many people as possible while doing it. How to penetrate the great secrets of the universe and damn the torpedoes. How to stir the demons of our destiny ...

Mick Rock

#12. 'The Bradshaws' is the appropriately inappropriate English title given to an enigma - some hundreds of thousands of mysterious rock art paintings scattered through the wilds of the Kimberley, an area larger than Germany in the remote, scarcely populated northwest of Australia.

Richard Flanagan

#13. Rock isn't art, it's the way ordinary people talk.

Billy Idol

#14. A lot of people do not like singer-songwriters, and a lot of people who like them do not like hard rock. It's either-or.

Art Alexakis

#15. Everybody was sorta going to sleep twards the end of 1983, and I felt that they had to be woken up!

Morrissey

#16. As I discovered music, especially Rock 'n Roll, new territory was opened to me. I was lured by the unbridled rhythm of this art form. It was like gasoline on the fire of my youthful spirit.

Taylor Hanson

#17. Until film is just as easily accessible as a pen or pencil, then it's not completely an art form. In painting you can just pick up a piece of chalk, a stick or whatever. In sculpture you can get a rock. Writing you just need a pencil and paper.

Forest Whitaker

#18. I've always been a dreamer, have always believed
in the power of love and art and loud, life-affirming rock and roll, but, for the first time,
I'm starting to have doubts. Can a dream even exist in reality? Or does it turn to stone
the second it leaves your mind?

Pete Wentz

#19. Rock and roll, as I see it, is the ultimate populist art form, democracy in action, because it's true: anybody can do it.

Lester Bangs

#20. Formally, I did my studies in the sciences, but I was very conscious that I was being deprived of culture. While studying neuroscience, I was running a rock-music festival and was able to use that as a platform to explore what it takes to produce art for 20,000 inebriated 20-somethings.

Natalie Jeremijenko

#21. Everything combines for the works of Merzbow. I don't see them as being different and separate ... Music and art is not separate. I mix rock sounds and art together .

Richard Pinhas

#22. When I was a kid, I was told rock n' roll wasn't music. It wasn't art. Queen was my proof, my evidence, that these people were wrong - and they meant everything to me.

Axl Rose

#23. Comics seem to be cooking these days. It's like being a rock star.

Art Spiegelman

#24. ISIS and these kinds of extremists are a death cult. We're a life cult. Rock 'n' roll is a life force, and it's joy as an act of defiance.

Bono

#25. Work-home-work-home, that's being an actor. Being a rock star? I get to travel the world, meet all the fans in person, party with my fans every night, and people who appreciate the art.

Mitchel Musso

#26. All the traumas I went through separating art from writing don't exist anymore. That's why I love being in rock 'n' roll. It's a whole life thing.

Patti Smith

#27. America does four things better than any other country in the world: rock music, movies, software and high-speed pizza delivery. All of these are sacred American art forms.

Courtney Love

#28. Punk was sort of an angry stance against things that had happened just before, against the pop of glam rock, against progressive rock. Music had become very staid and it was about the playing and people obsessed. Eric Clapton was God and we needed an enema within the art form, and punk did do that.

Gary Kemp

#29. I'm a happy member of the church. I'm proud of it and defend it. It makes me bold and gives me confidence. I feel I know the answer to life - that it's all about. If you're not searching for the answer to life, you have more time to make art. It's a rock for me upon which I can tap dance.

Catherine Hicks

#30. Once the subject matter of rock n' roll changed from cars and pop love songs to songs about really true love and the blues and death and mortality, this light bulb went off in my head and I went, 'Oh, that's what they're doing. That's kind of - that's art.'

David Chase

#31. As far as he could see, the drawings were simply alive. They might be colored earth on rock, but they were as alive as the kangaroo that'd just hopped away.

Terry Pratchett

#32. You can't seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues - you can't seperate it. Because that's where it all started, and that's where it all come from - that's where I learned to keep rhythm - in church.

Art Blakey

#33. I went to art school and never thought I'd be a musician, but then punk rock came along in the late 70s and kind of ruined my life. So I quit art school to get involved in music and I've been doing it ever since.

Michael Gira

#34. Comedy is a live art, and the only way to record a comedy rock album is to do it live. The audience and their laughter is just as much a part of the album sound as our music. No retakes, no room for error.

Vir Das

#35. Art is sacred.
Punk rock is freedom.
Expression and right to express is vital.
Anyone can be artistic.

Kurt Cobain

#36. Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck.

John Dryden

#37. Punk rock has become another viable art form. It always was. But now it's like everyone's doing it.

Tre Cool

#38. The world is full of bands and bullshit, and if I'm doing a stupid art project like rock 'n' roll then I want to spare my audience as much as possible.

Ariel Pink

#39. If you fall asleep on horseback, the horse will stop by the rock. Art is a car. Kitsch is a horse.

Odd Nerdrum

#40. Rock was different from rock and roll. Rock was virtuosic and adult, as opposed to popsy and teenaged. Rock and roll was apolitical and fun, while rock was "heavy" and often political, creating vistas of psychic energy that carried beyond the music itself and into radical politics and art.

Stephen Davis

#41. I think some of the musicians are more like punk rock musicians. It's like an art as opposed to being a musician. It's definitely more radical psychedelic bands, more than anything.

Wayne Coyne

#42. Our band had perfected the art of punk-rock camping, throwing a bunch of crap into the van with, like, an hour's notice and just driving out into the mountains, where we'd drink beer, burn food, jam on our instruments around the campfire, and sack out under the open sky.

Gayle Forman

#43. They say rock is dead. Andy [Warhol] said art is dead. God is dead according to Nietzsche. If everything's dead what's alive? Only technology. We're in the era of technology.

Sean Lennon

#44. Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

Will Rogers

#45. When Paul and I were first friends, starting in the sixth grade and seventh grade, we would sing a little together and we would make up radio shows and become disc jockeys on our home wire recorder. And then came rock and roll.

Art Garfunkel

#46. I feel like pop stars can't be rock stars anymore because they have to be role models, and it takes the fun out of it for us, because we just want to have fun with art.

Rihanna

#47. I loved hard-rock bands, and I loved songwriters who told stories.

Art Alexakis

#48. Technology is 50% of rock 'n' roll - the magic, the art, the performance. If you don't have good technicians and a strong road crew who are devoted and believe in you and protect you, you're totally naked.

Patti Smith

#49. Leaders can change the tenor of the workplace and create harmony in motion toward a favorable result. So every time you say to your team, "Let's rock and roll," make sure you have already set up the stage to where they can actually perform like rock stars.

Thomas Huynh

#50. Crafternoon is about making what you want, how you want it, to the best of your ability. And even if you may not think of yourself as a rock star of creativity, it's there inside you. At Crafternoon, you are a CraftStar.

Maura Madden

#51. I really fell in love with the art of making clothes when I was dancing on tour. Creating my stage image through clothes was a blast. I discovered a total sense for what cool chicks and rockin' dudes like to wear. Total Skull is for those people. People that like to rock - total rock.

Sheri Moon Zombie

#52. What cultural revolutionaries do not seem to grasp is that, far from being a grass-roots art form that has been taken over by businessmen, rock itself comes from the commercial exploitation of the blues.

Ellen Willis

#53. The Lord is saying literally, "Thou art 'Petros' [the masculine form of the word], and upon this 'petra' [the feminine form of the word] I will build My church. Thou art a rock, Peter, and upon this rock, I will build My church.

J. Dwight Pentecost

#54. Like punk rock, like Jackson Pollock, like Jack Kerouac, it was truly human, a mix of perfect beauty and cathartic error.

Yann Martel

#55. I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did'.

Kurt Vonnegut

#56. It was '86. We were a big enough name and we had enough cache that MTV wanted to play us, so, along with Michael Jackson and Madonna, they played our upside-down, black-and-white, backward, single unedited footage of a rock quarry with orange letters over the top of it and called it art.

Michael Stipe

#57. I love rock-n-roll. I think it's an exciting art form. It's revolutionary. Still revolutionary and it changed people. It changed their hearts. But yeah, even rock-n-roll has a lot of rubbish, really bad music.

Nick Cave

#58. You always feel like rock critics are frustrated musicians. I envy musicians their ability to live their art and share it with an audience, in the moment.

Todd Haynes

#59. A lot of festivals can be a jumble of electronic music and rock and roll, and everything's all mixed up - some things are more performance art or light shows or dance parties, and then you'll have a singer-songwriter stuck in the middle to make the changeovers easier.

Jenny O.

#60. The noise distorts the truth but we can break through, we need to base our foundation upon the Rock.

Eric Samuel Timm

#61. I experimented with fashion as it being more like art, allowing what I wore to express what I was feeling on the inside. Androgyny, rock culture, and grunge - they definitely had an effect on the things that made me feel cool and comfortable.

Ruby Rose

#62. After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism Leninism

Niall Ferguson

#63. You can't really appreciate a work of art until you can understand how difficult it was to create. And that's probably true of any work of art - a rock, a tree, a bird, a fish, a sunrise made of light and air.

Laurence Overmire

#64. We are so fortunate, as Australians, to have among us the oldest continuing cultures in human history. Cultures that link our nation with deepest antiquity. We have Aboriginal rock art in the Kimberley that is as ancient as the great Palaeolithic cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux in Europe.

Kevin Rudd

#65. Question everything, even the question mark, that shepherd's crook floating in the air above that small round rock

If you - stubbornly - still wish to be unhappy,
maybe you can grasp it.

Dick Allen

#66. I just wanna be a rock star!

Art Alexakis