Why learn a number like pi to so many decimal places? The answer I gave then as I do now is that pi is for me an extremely beautiful and utterly unique thing. Like the Mona Lisa or a Mozart symphony, pi is its own reason for loving it.
Look beyond the paint. Let us try to open our minds to a new idea.
What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear. [...] Walter Pater is to call her a 'vampire,' coasting through history on her secret tasks.
Did you ever see that painting the Mona Lisa. It always reminds me of a reporter listening to a politician.
Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way.
One minute you're bleeding. The next minute you're hemorrhaging. The next minute you're painting the Mona Lisa.
I was sick of people making fun of my hair and so I cut it off and I've got much more attention than ever before. It was like when Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1906 - three times more people came to see where it used to be.
Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa's face.
Also, since art is a vehicle for the transmission of ideas through form, the reproduction of the form only reinforces the concept. It is the idea that is being reproduced. Anyone who understands the work of art owns it. We all own the Mona Lisa.
Burn the Louvre, and wipe your ass with the Mona Lisa. This way at least, God would know our names.
What I am trying to say is that it is not without any value. The value of copies is that they can direct us towards the original. I was recently at the Louvre Museum and I was filming people who were viewing the Mona Lisa. I noticed the number of ordinary people, astonished, mouths agape, standing still for long stretches looking at the work, and I wondered, "Where does this come from? Are these people all art connoisseurs?" They are like me; through the years, we've seen this work in our schoolbooks or art history books, but when we stand before the original, we hold our breath.
You cannot paint the Mona Lisa by assigning one dab each to a thousand painters.
Pat Nixon was called the Mona Lisa of American politics. She never wrote anything. Her interviews tell us nothing.
My favourite song of Elton's is... it's a tricky one for me. I'm a proper fan and I've probably seen him in concert about a dozen times before I even met him. Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters, which isn't in this film... but whenever I see him, I always tell him that Passengers is my favourite song because it's one of his least auspicious ones.
For all cats have this particularity, each and every one, from the meanest alley sneaker to the proudest, whitest she that ever graced a pontiff's pillow — we have our smiles, as it were, painted on. Those small, cool, quite Mona Lisa smiles that smile we must, no matter whether it's been fun or it's been not. So all cats have a politician's air; we smile and smile and so they think we're villains
My movies are film-paintings - moving portraits captured on celluloid. I'll layer that with sound to create a unique mood -- like if the Mona Lisa opened her mouth, and there would be a wind, and she'd turn back and smile. It would be strange and beautiful.
I suggested that it was not enough to add a moustache to the Mona Lisa: it should simply be destroyed.
You know, people call mystery novels or thrillers 'puzzles.' I never understood that, because when I buy a puzzle, I already know what it is. It's on the box. And even if I don't, if it's a 5,000-piece puzzle of the 'Mona Lisa', it's not like I put the last piece in and go, 'I had no idea it's the 'Mona Lisa'!'
It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the Mona Lisa. All art of the past must be destroyed.
I'm a producer. I'm a musician. And my job is to come in and, you know, put - you know, I treat all of the artists that I work with, like, you know, the way da Vinci was looking at Mona Lisa, you know, there's an interesting backdrop.
The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Fantasie Impromptu, the Bayeux tapestries, Romeo and Juliet, the windows of Chartres Cathedral, Paradise Lost - and a pulp murder story by Dan Moody. The process is the same in all; if the results are a little uneven, that doesn't invalidate the basic similarity of origin.
Leonardo's Mona Lisa sure would have lost out if he had spent only 2 of the 4 or 5 years he took to complete it. It is thinking about him and Ryder, among others, that partly makes me feel so awful to send away a 'half-baked' painting.
Could Hamlet have been written bya committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the NewTestament have been composed as a conference report?
The music I wanted to get into when I went to California, was to, uh, get into, uh, pop, mostly. And the big band era was on at that time. I was doing the "Mona Lisa"s, the "Stardust"s, "Stars Fell On Alabama," all this kind of stuff. And that was my thing that I wanted.
I'm at that age where I watch such things with two minds, one that cackles at these capers and another that never gets much beyond a rather jaded and self-conscious smile, like the Mona Lisa.
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