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.
The artist usually sets out -- or used to -- to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper functions of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
So many new things have been discovered in the 20th century that now, at the end of the century, we need some kind of synthesis, some musical language which will allow us just to write music.
An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
No sensible author wants anything but praise.
Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.
She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery.
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