With the Ford Foundation grant all of a sudden instead of being an artist that had made a couple of short films, I became a filmmaker who dabbled in the arts.
We're under the Arts Council under the Minister for the Arts. The Minister for the Arts and the Minister for Industrial Development have great difficulty in agreeing over who should fund what in terms of film.
I tried to keep both arts alive, but the camera won. I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!
I think there's a sort of agony with all intelligent and very creative designers that it's only fashion, that in the end it's only the decorative arts. I had a feeling towards the end that Saint Laurent and Berge were very keen to attain that immortality that a lot of designers long for. You know, those endless exhibitions.
Well, it was one of my most gratifying experiences because I could devote my knowledge and my talent for the good for the City of Washington, and all the Federal projects where the Fine Arts Commission had jurisdiction, and it was a tremendous experience.
Governments have always been wary of the arts because they're wayward and ambiguous and because they deal with feelings rather than facts.
Community colleges are great bargains. They avoid the fancy amenities four-year liberal arts colleges need in order to lure the children of the middle class.
The foreign accent was a promise, and indeed, all over the country, European imports added spice to the sciences, the arts, and other areas. What one had to give was not considered inferior to what one received.
As an artist I have an even more abiding interest in the compact between the Arts and Government.
Aside from my work, my interests lie in the arts and in world affairs.
Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
I wasn't the brightest kid in school. I was a backbencher troubling the frontbencher, and eventually I failed in my 10th grade. But then in higher secondary, there were only three people who got first division in arts, and I was one of them. So this tells you, where you put your mind and heart into, that's where you go.
People have had certain assumptions in the past about Conservative governments, partly because of some of the things that happened in the 1980s, and partly because of the tone of some of the debate in the 1980s that appeared to say public spending on the arts was something you might want to progressively reduce.
My mom was a high school science teacher for decades. She just never made it feel like we had to choose between the arts and the sciences. We had bookshelves full of novels, and she also had Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold and Carl Sagan.
I've always argued, unsuccessfully, that there's no point in giving money to the arts unless you educate people in them.
When I am in London, all I do is mix with other people in the arts.
Back in third grade, they used to say, 'Take whatever talent you have and think of something you can do with it.' I liked to draw, but what could I do with it? Maybe I could be an art dealer - nah, can't see myself doing that. Maybe I could do commercial arts?
This funding from the National Endowment for the Arts has been like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.
I liked to explore different arts. But when I started acting, I knew this was the medium I want to be in for the rest of my life. Stories onscreen affect me the most.
My entire life, I've always known that I wanted to be a performer, but I didn't know exactly how, where or when. I never learned or studied the craft, formally. I grew up doing martial arts and playing piano. But, something inside of me always said that I was going to do this, as far back as I can remember.
The importance of the arts to the societies in which they thrive is well documented.
I'm anti-social, and I don't have too many friends. I'm in my own world doing my own things - training in martial arts, dancing, or watching a Michael Jackson video.
I came from doing Wushu and other martial arts, and then I got into movies, and I had to learn that as well - the language of martial arts movie fighting. It's a different thing; it's a different kind of logic.
Instead of books, art, theatre, and music being consigned to specialized niches, we might have a criticism that better reflects the eclecticism of our time, a criticism that takes in various arts all at once.
'Celebrity' is sort of an idea. I mean, I get to do something extraordinary, but I don't think it makes me extraordinary. That's my opinion. I like to be an artist; I like to do things that are involved in the arts, but I don't think it makes me more special than a doctor, for example. A doctor is an extraordinary person.
Chadron had a water tower, grain elevators, a tanning salon, a video rental store, a small liberal arts college, a Hardee's, a stoplight, and a curling yellow sign in the pet store window that read, 'Hamsters and Tarantulas Featured Today.'
It was 'Shaolin Temple,' Jet Li's first movie. That was the movie that got me to want to learn martial arts. Then I became a huge Jet Li/Jackie Chan fan after that.
You want to be doing your best work whatever field of the arts you're in because your life's going to be over all too soon, and you have to make the most of it.
The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.
You perhaps know me as a novelist. Literature is one of the arts - in fact, the noblest of the arts. That is not my opinion; it was first expressed by the ancients. As art, literature has many similarities with the other art forms.
I play drums and guitar, I snowboard, I do martial arts and acrobatics. I go to the movies every Friday.
The Midwest isn't somewhere you mix with those from the performing arts. But my mum and dad would go off to Chicago every so often to see shows. They would bring back the albums and the movies, those little eight metres, and we would all watch. I think that was when I fell in love with acting.
Sir Kenneth MacMillan's version of 'Romeo and Juliet' is my favorite full-length ballet, Sergei Prokofiev's breathtaking score a favorite composition of music. As a student of martial arts, I loved drawing my sword in defense of my Capulet kin.
I'm a big fan of martial arts films, novels and radio programs.
Motion capture is exactly what it says: it's physical moves, whereas performance capture is the entire performance - including your facial performance. If you're doing, say, martial arts for a video game, that is motion capture. This is basically another way of recording an actor's performance: audio, facial and physical.
I have written favourably in support of subsidy for the arts since the 1960s, and I continue to believe absolutely in subsidy, as I do in the BBC licence fee.
