Al Barry Quotes

every story written is marks upon a page The same marks, repeated, only differently arranged

Elizabeth is smart, ruthless, and emotionally damaged ... [i]f Elizabeth's brain was a person, it would have scars, tattoos, and be missing one eye.

When someone thinks, "I liked his last book, I'll hope this new one is good" and shells out their hard-earned, I fervently want that person to be thrilled.

Apparently we're now in a state where most ads are full of people looking at us in a way that would heat us up down to our toes if it happened in real life, and we don't think anything of it.

I'm just a regular dude with an odd job.

I plan to rearrange the alphabetical order because i think it has a very big error on the parts of the sequence of some letters. For example, I have just discovered that U and I should be together.

I liked the idea of the words floating in space and the space behind it moving all the time, ever changing.

And we live in a kind of realm of language and words and so forth. So we can sort of relate to them. They don't exist without us. We create words.

Art was something that I was really interested in, probably more so than writing or anything else.

Developing your own style became something very interesting, very important to me.

Any artwork is part of something larger, grander and, you know, the situation that it's in is very important.

Everybody is always satisfied with what I do.

I certainly don't believe that people can read other people's minds.

But artistically, my art I kept very separate from my political beliefs, deliberately and very, very rarely would I allow that kind of thing into it.

And the mind actually does generate electrical currents - very weak ones and not necessarily ones that can be picked up by anyone else.

I didn't make videos for a long time because I hated the look of TV sets.

How does any idea come to your mind? I don't know.

Agnes Martin is a big influence in my work actually, when I first saw her, these fine grids.

So I never had trouble getting work or working or doing - I always worked. I worked when I went to college. I worked after school.

I was never that big a rock-and-roll, rock guy. I really preferred jazz, you know, that kind of thing.

I was also a good writer, by the way. My, you know, my English teacher and writing teacher loved my writing. You know, I wrote short stories and things like that. And they liked them very much.

I think my parents - my parents were very hands-off, quite liberal in terms of their - they really - they did encourage me, but they never really pushed me into anything, really.

I was good at art - always good at art.

I have to say, I'm not someone who's really big into my family history - never really was very curious about it. The only thing I know about it is what I picked up from my aunts and parents.

By being critical, you also develop your own style of what you like, what direction you want to move.

I've always said my biggest influence is my, just, the last work I did, the last piece I made.

I made films from the - when I was a little kid, my father bought me a movie camera. I just wanted to. I don't know how. You just learn, you just do it. You just do it.

I was a filmmaker. I made movies. I made films. And I always took photos and made films, always from the beginning.

I really wasn't about to get a Ph.D. in art history, you know, which you'd absolutely needed. And that was not something I wanted. And I loved art history, but not that way.

I was always - I was a movie nut. I lived in the movies, really.

I think I feel much more at home in studio.

I am very easy. I like to have my work out. I am not restrictive about any of that. It is the collectors that are possessive, not me, not me.

I am a very lucky artist in the sense that I have had all my life a lot of opportunities to do what I want to do.

I never stop thinking about what I have to do. Let's put it that way. The only thing that takes me out of that is probably a film. I watch a lot of movies.

Normally my head is always filled with art ideas and things that I have to do, deadlines that I have to meet.

I work sometimes with dealers and sometimes people just come to me. A lot of the commissions, they just know me. They have seen something and they just approach me.

If somebody gives me a chance to do something, I am going to use that space, that time, that light, that whatever it is and try and work with it.

I just try things and whether people like it or if I find it successful or not, I just do it.

I never ever approached a dealer. I have always been approached by dealers or curators or whatever.

I am an artist who works very well under pressure, in fact. I like to have deadlines.

I work with deadlines. It is terrible to be an artist where you are just producing work and nobody gives a damn. Nobody wants to show it.

I have a lot of ideas for art. And it is really - I don't really have time to do them all.

I shoot a lot of video, first of all, whatever I think is interesting, just my travels; hard to say why. If something looks good, I take a picture or try to shoot it.

I'm not a person - and my wife also - we don't really go to the beach or anything like that. We go to cities.

The first place I try to go when I have free time is the museums. I'm a big museum person.

I don't have a dream project. I don't really think in those terms, to tell you the truth.

I make my own surprises and I'm always surprised to see what I do, to see it when it's finished and the biggest challenge is once I finish it, it's not a failure. It's not a flop.

I'm my own worst critic. I mean, I know what's wrong with everything that I've done.

I'm always looking for relations between my work and the old masters.

The space between things is important to me. The projections, that darkness between the words or the images is very important.