Quotes About Artistry

Don't make a film if it can't be the film you want to make. It's a joke, and a sick joke, and it'll kill you.

Making a film is a beautiful mystery. You go deep into the wood, and you don't want to come out of that wood.

Always remember, the person we're really working for is the person who's restoring the piece a hundred years from now. He's the one we want to impress.

I'm not the kind of artist that wants to get a sound, refine it, and do it 'til I'm 50 so that it's the purest amber of my one way.

I feel fortunate about being able to make the music I want to make and getting away with it

I mean, at the end of the day when I'm making a record, what I want to do is what I do

The problem is that I don't want to add another record to the world that is not necessary to be published, except to make some business. There has to be a musical reason.

But at a certain point, you have to take your influence and find your own voice if you want to become a relevant artist.

I don't have any delusions of grandeur. I just want to make music that doesn't make me bored.

I don't think it's important who I am. I really like playing music, but I don't really want to be anything in particular.

It's not crazy to want to have certain songs be developed harmonically and still want to make noise with the guitar. And you can have both.

I'm certainly not a f**king fashion consultant. Don't call me if you want to know how to dress. I just rap. That's all I really know how to do.

I am really pleased to hear each of my songs described as a total surprise. This is what I want!

The music I turn out these days is the kind of music I want to hear myself.

I'm a songwriter who just wants to bring people great songs.

I've always been drawn to the best writing that I can find. I don't care if it's in movies or theater or whatever - if you want to be in front of an audience, you have to do writing you believe in.

I know that I'm a real writer because sometimes I write a story just because I want to; not because someone's told me to.

I also just accept that I might never want to write a song again.

To be a living artist is to be driven again and again to explain oneself, to justify every creative decision, yet to bite down hard on the bit is the only honourable recourse, to my mind at least. Explain nothing, justify even less. Grin at the gallows, dear friends!

Marionettes dance afield beneath masterly hands— I stumble among them crossed by the strings in tangled two-step and curse all these fools in their mad pirouette— I shall not live as they do oh, no, leave me in my circled dance— these unbidden twitchings you see I swear on Hood's Grave is artistry in motion S

No purer artist exists or has ever existed than a child freed to imagine.

Interest is never enough. If it doesn't haunt you, you'll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore them. (from Workbook)

The dreamtime of creative work is a turnstile to eternity. (from Workbok)

Cast a spell and the small flaws don't matter. (From Workbook)