Kindness and intelligence don't always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.
In those days, it didn't take much imagination to come up with something that required great lyric development skills. You just thought of an experience that you might have gone through, and write it down.
You want to do something that shows some type individuality and talent and imagination - at the same time, you want to be truthful to the predecessors, because obviously the audience liked something about them and you have to replicate that experience to a certain extent.
I don't think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.
Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings indirectly.
I certainly know there are people in positions of power in the business who lack imagination and, perhaps as a result of that, think of me as 'David'. But I wouldn't really want to work with those people, you know?
Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe.
If you don't pay attention and if your imagination isn't pretty much engaged, you're going to miss things and you're going to miss opportunities for it to be as compelling and as creepy as it can be.
