I've been very fortunateit's just been an amazing piece of luck. I haven't had to suffer for my art but I've suffered enough inside to hopefully be called an artist.
Interpretation
The quote expresses gratitude for good fortune in one's artistic journey while acknowledging inner struggles that contribute to artistic identity.
Christopher Plummer highlights the duality of being an artist: the external luck that can aid in a successful career, contrasted with the internal challenges and emotional experiences that shape one's artistry. While he recognizes that he has not faced significant external hardships, he implies that the internal suffering is what lends authenticity and depth to his work as an artist, making his experiences all the more meaningful.
In practice
This quote can be used during an art exhibition to discuss the role of luck and emotional experiences in artistic expression.
I was always a happy kid. I'd play the piano fairly well. I did all sorts of things fairly well. But who the hell wants to be happy all the time? It's a miserable state to be in permanently. Can you imagine how dreary that would be?
A lot of people want to retire; I couldn't. You don't retire in our business. What, play golf and watch television? Oh, please.
I think anger does fuel a successful acting career. To play the great roles, you have to learn how to blaze.
Most of my life I have played a lot of famous people but most of them were dead so you have a poetic license.
I want to paint Montreal as a rather fantastic city, which it was, because nobody knows today what it was like. And I'm one of the last survivors, or rapidly becoming one.
When you're writing a novel, you spend four years sitting in your basement and a year waiting for the book to come out and then you get the feedback. When you do work online, the moment you're finished making it, people start responding to it which is really fun and allows for a kind of community development you just can't have in novels.
There is no longer beauty except in the struggle. No more masterpieces without an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault against the unknown forces in order to overcome them and prostrate them before men.
I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death.
What science cannot declare, art can suggest; what art suggests silently, poetry speaks aloud; but what poetry fails to explain in words, music can express. _x000D_ Whoever knows the mystery of vibrations indeed knows all things.
And sometimes through the mirror blue The knights come riding two and two.
Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.
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