Quotes About Artistry

I would really like to take on something that really surprises people and shows that I want to be taken seriously as an actress. Also, creatively speaking, that sounds really fun.

Let the novelists fret about consistency - story writers should feel free to jam; to get things right in new, surprising ways by allowing themselves, now and then, to get things wrong.

I was dealing with craft, and that's the surprising thing, the number of people who have literally broken down on our stage, because when you're talking about the thing that is most important to someone, they're liable to feel something strong.

On different projects, different pieces of you will show up. Sometimes it's surprising which piece shows up.

Performing is the one time I don't have anxiety - surprisingly, right?

When I'm on stage, it's like a different world ... me connecting with the audience. It's a surreal experience.

My first book is really comparable to what I do now, where it's pretty surreal and strange at moments, but that being my first book - I wrote that when I was 22; it came out when I was 24 - and it was just really overwritten. I just didn't trust myself as a writer to say something once.

When Prince is into what you're doing, it's just surreal.

Todd Solondz is a film maker I've always loved because of how he balances darkness, humour and surrealism in his films.

'Birdman' came from a very beautiful side of me, from a part of honesty and surrender about things.

All the time I was playing the flute, the lines, the solos, the riffs, the construction, were based on my guitar skills. I did not play the flute to exploit its natural faculties, but I used it as a surrogate guitar.

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.

The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.

The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas.

The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.

Writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.

When it's good it comes easy. Anything you have read or heard to the contrary is a lot of mishmash.

The only salvation for a writer is to write. If there is anything good in him, it will come out.

The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem.

The artistry of the writing is meant to stir the whole of our person, since it's the whole of that person who must feel the force of philosophy and be changed as a consequence.

After all, many people make babies; only one made To the Lighthouse and Three Guineas...

I wanted English to be an instrument on which many kinds of music could be played. I wanted writing that could be lavish, subtle, evocative, that could describe mists and moods and hopes and not just facts and solid objects. I wanted to map how the world is connected by patterns and intuitions and resemblances. I wanted to trace the lost patterns that came before the world is broken and find the new ones we could make out of the shards.

I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.

But we knew that when one goes into a shop and buys a cake one gets nothing but a cake, which may be very good, but is only a cake; whereas if one goes into the kitchen and makes a cake because some people one respects and probably likes are coming to eat at one's table, one is striking a low note on a scale that is struck higher up by Beethoven and Mozart.