Brad Mehldau a dit..

One of the qualities of art that attracted me initially was its seemingly mystical ability to raise up the everyday experience of life and transfigure it, give it beauty. Being exposed to new music, literature, and the like was never a discovery for me. On the contrary, it was always a confirmation of something shared between myself and its creator, an overlap of sentiments, if you will. But a novel, a piece of music, a painting, would go one step further, a crucial step: It would nurture and embrace this sentiment, no matter how unappealing it might be, and give it a facelift or two, using all the trickery and witchcraft of its medium. This process is explained by Thomas Mann's character, Tonio Kröger, who gives us a rather fatalistic dictum: "The artist must be unhuman, extra-human; he must stand in a queer aloof relationship to our humanity; only so is he in a position...to represent it, to present it, to portray it to good effect. The very gift of style, of form and expression is nothing more than this cool and fastidious attitude towards humanity.... For sound natural feeling, say what you like, has no taste."