Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Kids are always infatuated with the action in Martial Arts Films. Let me tell you, there is nothing better for kids than the Arts. That is what kept me straight and decent. I always had a place to go. That was the dojo. I always had something to look forward to doing.
We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.
I loved science, and when I discovered Buddhist meditative practices and martial arts, I was able to bridge those ways of knowing the world into my own unique way. From that grew the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, which became my karmic assignment.
I think my parents were surprisingly cool with me entering the arts. Although, I think they thought it was going to be a phase, and they didn't expect me to actually stick with it, and rightfully so. They were concerned whether I could afford groceries, being an actor.
There is all this controversy that women and girls are too skinny or too overweight. I say to just do martial arts and everything will be okay. You will tone up your body and find a confidence you can't find just sitting around watching TV and hanging out with friends.
My initial plan was to spend a year in France, go to some kind of school and learn a bit of French. I went a year in an American college in the outskirts of Strasbourg, but got a glimpse of a real art school, L'Ecole des Arts Decoratifs, and enrolled the following year.
I'm at this point in my career where I'm trying to step away from the realm of fine arts, because I think it's a very exclusive, very restrictive place to be. What I want to be able to do is to change the lives of people with the same materials they deal with every day.
One of the smartest things Kickstarter has done, in my opinion, is give people a great shopping experience related to the arts, that funds the arts. In essence, they've gotten people to pay $200 for a t-shirt plus the feeling of participation in another artist's endeavor.
My dad worked at a mechanical factory for 35 years. I grew up in Union City, NJ. My mother is a social worker. My sister runs a 7-Eleven, and my brother is a detox counselor. They had no predilection for the arts. But from a very young age, I really, really loved theater.
Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.
I do martial arts mostly. But if I am bored, or my body is aching, I swim or go the gym. I can sometimes be doing cardio on the treadmill, kick boxing, stretching, dance, whatever I feel like. I just make sure I have something to do every day but no particular set routine.
I dropped out of high school three days into my senior year because I hated it because New York City public school is a mess. I certainly wasn't one for sitting in a classroom. Then I went off to college to North Carolina School of the Arts, then quit that after two years.
To make a film like 'The Grandmaster,' I know I'm not going to make just a standard kung-fu film; it's not going to be just tricks or like wire works. So I spent seven years on the road interviewing different schools and a lot of real grandmasters from Chinese martial arts.
A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.
Read, listen to and watch everything you can. Explore the corners of popular culture and the arts. And, of course, these days you have to stay maniacally plugged in to the cutting edge of whatever technology is taking your profession into the future - otherwise you're toast.
I still do all my developing and printing in my darkroom. Being in New York, you get tremendous exposure to great arts. In my student years, I saw exhibitions of August Sander and Diane Arbus. I still go back to their pictures. I don't really go for contemporary photo shows.
Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.
Arts education is a big part of building a 21st century creative mind, and I think that we have let way too many kids lose their way by not drawing in their young minds with music, dance, painting and the other various ways we can express those things we do not have words for.
People think that the arts are optional and they aren't. They teach a level of emotional depth that's equally important to mathematic skill. You can replace some math skills with a calculator if you know how to operate the thing, but there's no calculator for human interaction.
Jackie Chan is a very good comedy/martial arts star. He does one kind of martial arts that Jet Li doesn't know how to do and Jet Li does a martial art that Jackie Chan doesn't know how to do. You can both go to two Chinese restaurants, but both can have different kinds of food.
The true game of mixed martial arts is putting your wrestling in there, putting your striking in there, but also being deceiving - hiding behind your punches if you're wrestling and hiding behind your wrestling if you're punching. It's just a matter of blending it all together.
I always remember responding very emotionally to film. I had a lot of lonely time on my hands because I wasn't really the best-looking kid in my town and I sort of pined after girls. I had to sort of immerse myself in the arts because girls weren't particularly interested in me.
Almost everybody agrees that the Academy has to become more diverse. Even the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences knows this, which is why, in 2013, it announced it would extend its membership quotas in an attempt to bring more women and minorities into the organization.
There are different types of talents and intelligences, and traditional schools sometimes ignore the creative ones. It is important for us to give kids every platform for them to find what they are good at and what they love. The arts also provide a space for newfound creativity.
I went to really good New York City public schools that had arts programs. So in junior high, I got into the drama department. From there, I went to a performing arts high school in New York City called Laguardia and I just kind of fell into the professional side by happenstance.
School work and intellectual interests such as music and the arts were not especially important to me while I was growing up, although mathematics, my favorite subject, was fun. Baseball was my first passion: I played sand lot and Little League and rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
I see the difficulty of kids in going to university, the difficulty of kids in schools getting arts education, so that the arts and drama and the creative arts are extracurricular. They aren't: they are at the centre, and they are the equipment we so desperately need in the world.
We believed that there's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it's bad, it's something else. It was a much, much harder line in the '50s and '60s than it is now, because the idea of art education didn't exist - they didn't have a fine arts program when I was a kid.
I went to a school called Tring Park School for the Performing Arts. I went because initially I was very naughty, and my mom thought if I was busy, I'd be better. And I didn't really do acting until later on in the school, with an amazing teacher. I left, went traveling, came back.
I used to love martial arts movies starring Bruce Lee and Jean Claude Van Damme. In one of Van Damme's movies, he would break a pine tree. I would kick banana trees because I used to live on a farm. My father would get mad at me because I would break all of the banana trees around.
When I first moved to L.A., I discovered Roy London. I didn't know anything about the arts, the profession; I had no technique, I knew nothing, I'm fresh from Missouri. I sat in on a few classes, and they just felt a little guru-ish and just didn't feel right to me. Until I met Roy.
My mom being raised in England, her father always wanted to pursue the arts and wanted to have a stage career in England. According to her, he never had the courage to actually pursue it full-time. I think that my grandfather's parents thought that it wasn't a formidable job to have.
As an arts journalist in London, working mainly for the BBC, I interviewed hundreds if not thousands of authors. From them I gleaned a great deal of passing instruction in writing and I observed one fascinating detail: no two writers approach their work - physically - in the same way.
Most of the creative industries have been deskilled by these really powerful ideologies of punk in music and Warhol in the visual arts. I think it would be great for us collectively to ask whether it's had a negative or positive effect in contributing imaginative stuff to our culture.
Prior to going to college, I had a pretty strong accent, and that was one of the things I had to work on a lot. I went to North Carolina School of the Arts; my speech teacher... that was one of the things we really had to work on over the years, and thankfully I think it finally worked.
I describe management as arts, crafts and science. It is a practice that draws on arts, craft and science and there is a lot of craft - meaning experience - there is a certain amount of craft meaning insight, creativity and vision, and there is the use of science, technique or analysis.
Performing arts was something I was always part of. That was may be the only common thread that ran throughout my education, throughout my schooling years. But apart from that, there were no friends or no long term associations. That was the only thing I knew was with me wherever I went.
A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art.
I am always going to be in the hood in my heart, but what I did was added on the masters of arts, fine arts and the doctorate... if you want me to pull that out, I can get very distinguished... but I'm not going there... I don't have to put on airs; the knowledge comes out - just listen.
Like, even going to Duke Ellington School of the Arts, like, they slept on me. I think they thought I was talented, but for whatever reason, they didn't want to give me a lot of solos or any type of just love like that. But I don't know. I think that's what encouraged me to grind so hard.
I do not believe in a universal religion any more than I believe in a universal language. My feeling is that people have to make their own religion as they have to make their arts and their parishes, and that they must find their own salvation; the salvation mongers are of not much avail.
I think Ang Lee is a very, very talented director. He used martial arts to talk about love and girl, you know... But Zhang Yimou tried to use martial arts film to talk about Chinese culture, Chinese people. What do they think, what do they want and what do they hope the world will become.
My father was a great connoisseur of music and arts. He said, 'I will encourage you in anything you do, but make sure you get a solid education.' So, I studied in the finest schools and went on to become a qualified barrister but didn't take up law because my music was my area of interest.
It's a fine line of doing what's good for your life and what your parents want you to do, but also following your dreams. With my parents, when I was younger, I always had to do two things. If I was acting, I always had to do a sport or something on the arts side of things along with that.
I've danced my whole life. Martial arts is just fun for me, it's all choreographed a bit like dance. I have done Muay Thai and Wushu, which is cool because it's very fluid dance. I also do Tricking. It's kind of like Taekwondo with the big kicks and flips and showier aspects of martial arts.
My martial arts came a lot from my uncle, who actually taught martial arts through the military. He was a black belt in tae kwon do, but also, he used a lot of military-style fighting where it's not the high kicks or anything like that. It's basically defeat your opponent as fast as possible.
I don't consider myself an artist necessarily, but craftsmen or people in the arts, their spiritualism is sort of when you're writing well or performing well or doing whatever you do well, there's an element of that that's either God-given, a talent that you're not necessarily responsible for.
Boston was a great city to grow up in, and it probably still is. We were surrounded by two very important elements: academia and the arts. I was surrounded by theater, music, dance, museums. And I learned how to sail on the Charles River. So I had a great childhood in Boston. It was wonderful.
I'm interested in so many different things and I'd like to cover a lot of territory. I'm trying to see my show as the Sunday 'Times.' You have the Arts & Leisure section, you have the Op-Ed page, you have the Book Review... even the Style section has those wonderful essays about relationships.
I was a very interested arts student, I was always into that part of school and when I got into high school I went into architectural drafting. It gave me an understanding of how to build things and it's really helped me put things in perspective. With my music and my movies, to me it's all art.