Quotes About Inspiration

I do tend to use watercolors - I love the splatter sort of thing you can do with watercolors.

She was an enthusiastic painter of oils and watercolors. She was also very generous. I could mess with her paints and brushes all I wanted. On one condition: that I kept my brushes clean. The only art lesson my mother gave me was how to wash my brushes.

I especially love all the instruments of art: inks, pens, paintbrushes, watercolors and oils, fine papers and canvases, and although I love to mess around with these tools and objects, I have minimal artistic skills.

I paint daily with watercolors on 5-by-7-inch pads that are small enough for me to take them everywhere.

Writing, to me, is like kayaking a river. You are paddling down, and you come to a walled-off canyon, and you make a sharp turn, and you don't know what's around the corner. It could be a waterfall, it could be a big pool. The narrative current carries you. You're surprised, and you're thrilled, and sometimes you're terrified.

When I think of character actors, I think of Spencer Tracy; I think of Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall. When I was a young lad watching films, my eyes were on them - watching 'On the Waterfront,' my eyes are on Rod Steiger and Karl Malden, not on Brando.

Everyone's inspired by Brando. When I started acting, my dad showed me 'On the Waterfront,' and I thought, 'That's the coolest guy I've ever seen.'

Growing up, I loved films like 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and 'On the Waterfront' and became a huge fan of Marlon Brando.

Alex Higgins was my hero, so to play in Belfast, at the superb Waterfront Hall, is very special to me.

My mom is a nurse; my dad is a pediatrician. They were born in the 1940s, and they were both inspired to fight against injustice, whether it was the injustices of the Vietnam War or Watergate or children in poverty or oppression of African Americans in Philadelphia where I was growing up.

After Watergate, which happened when I was in college, I became increasingly inspired by journalism as a way to change the world. It sounds corny, but to wake the public up, to serve a higher cause.

I didn't really see a way to make a living on the farm. I always loved writing. I was the guy who won the D.A.R. essay contest and things like that, and it was the era of Watergate, and I decided I would be the next Woodward and Bernstein, and then retire to the farm.

To be able to walk out the door when you come home from a job and wander into the garden to do a bit of watering gives you time to be creative in your mind.

Sometimes I have to pinch myself to think: have I really come this far? Because it is quite different, where I find myself today, from where I started off, in the streets of Waterloo, in the suburbs of Liverpool - that's for sure.

If the purpose of the stumpy little NFT theatre under Waterloo Bridge is not to acquaint young audiences with Ozu, with Ophuels, with D. W. Griffith and with Agnes Varda, then what exactly does it exist for?

Growing up in Waterloo, the Governor General's Award wasn't something I even thought to wish for.

I wanted to play blues. But I wasn't blue enough. I wasn't like Muddy Waters, people who really had it hard. In our house, we had food on the table. We were doing well compared to many. So I concentrated on this fun and frolic, these novelties.

Bermuda - the waters are calm and shallow and are excellent for snorkelling. I loved St, George's on the tip of the island. I got to swing from the vines like a Jungle Jane and visit Crystal Caves, which were the inspiration for TV show 'Fraggle Rock.'

I'd like to work with John Waters. I grew up in Maryland, so I'm a huge Waters fan.

I love Muddy Waters and Nina Simone. I also watched 'The Blues Brothers' movie over and over.

I didn't have the sensibilities of your ordinary filmmaker, let alone your ordinary African-American filmmaker. My heroes were John Waters, Pedro Almodovar, and actors that were part of that world.

It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.

My favorite country blues player was Big Bill Broonzy. City blues was Freddie King, but I liked them all - Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Ralph Willis, Lonnie Johnson, Brownie McGhee and the three Kings, B.B., Albert and Freddie. Jazz-wise, I listened to Django, Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery.

I'm sort of standing on T-Bone Walker's shoulders, Les Paul's shoulders, Lightnin' Hopkins' shoulders, Muddy Waters' shoulders, you know? And if I've inspired other people, I'm pleased. That pleases me greatly.