One thing is certain: the arts keep you alive. They stimulate, encourage, challenge, and, most of all, guarantee a future free from boredom. They allow growth and even demand it in that time of life we call maturity but too often enter it with a childish faith that what we learned in youth is sustenance enough for the years when most men are mentally famished but won't admit it—or when they are apt to curb their hunger with the sops of complacency, security, and the assurance of death.
Interpretation
The arts are essential for personal growth and preventing boredom throughout life.
Vincent Price emphasizes the vital role of the arts in maintaining vitality and encouraging growth as individuals mature. He suggests that engaging with the arts keeps minds stimulated and challenges complacency, rather than allowing people to settle into a monotonous existence, thus highlighting the importance of creativity and self-expression in a fulfilling life.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of arts education in schools.
There's something fascinating about seeing something you don't like at first but directly know you will love—in time. People are that way, all through life. You come against a personality, and it questions yours. You shy away but know there are gratifying secrets there, and the half-open door is often more exciting than the wide.
What's important about an actor is his acting, not his life.
I trust people who are violent about art, as long as they aren't closed-minded. But, unfortunately, most art blowhards are also art bigots.
We may all be a peculiar lot...often broke, often dissatisfied because we're not doing more and better work...but we know how to have a ball that makes the rest of the world seem square.
In art, religion, and politics the respect must be mutual, no matter how violent the disagreement.
Painting, like any art, comprises a technique, a workmanlike handling of material, but the accuracy of a tone and the fictitious combination of effects depend entirely on the choice made by the artist.
Well, you put a little piece of yourself into every character that you do. Even if you're playing some psychotic person, which of course I'm not, some part of you is in that character and it's hopefully believable. I always come back to the fact that my own instinct is better than something I build in my mind.
American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger.
From all these experiences the most important thing I have learned is that legibility and beauty stand close together and that type design, in its restraint, should be only felt but not perceived by the reader.
I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.