Quotes About Creativity

I'm a daydreamer.

I'd always fantasized about writing a new play. Even when I had all this success in television, what I was daydreaming about in my dressing room is that one day I would do it.

I'm very good at daydreaming. Ask any of my schoolteachers.

It's nice to film in somewhere that you actually love being. Usually, you're in a studio for months on end, and you never see any daylight, so you really make the most of it.

They didn't let us see daylight on 'Community.'

I work at night, starting at around 10 o'clock and working until 2 or 3 in the morning. I do that usually five days a week. In Berkeley, I have an office behind our house that I share with my wife, who works more in the daytime.

For me personally, and I'm sure not everyone is like this. But for me I find it difficult to choreograph in the daytime.

You know the way there are two kinds of actors - the De Niro kind who's always De Niro, and then somebody like Daniel Day-Lewis, who transforms himself eerily? Well, I aim to be the Daniel Day-Lewis kind of writer. I don't have a house style.

Books are alive, you see. They're not dead, they're alive.

A show can be completely dead before you even get on the air. I've been privy to a couple of those.

It's not a happy time when a film drops dead on your doorstep.

Some songs are dead easy, and others can be quite challenging. Other times, you just have to put it in the bin.

The best thing for my creative process is a deadline.

I write because it feels good, and I don't have a deadline, and I don't have people telling me what they want me to write. Maybe if I did, I wouldn't be very good at it.

'Senna' took five years, 'Amy' took three years. You try and say, 'Look, there's no deadline.' That's important. Just saying, 'We've got to make the film. And once the film's ready, it will be out there.'

Usually composers need a reason to write. I need a deadline.

I don't see myself as an artist, as a writer. The sort of writing that I do, which is popular fiction, it's work. I have contracts to fulfil, and I have deadlines to meet.

It usually takes about a year to write each book. I don't plan it that way. I don't set deadlines. If a book wants to take longer, it can.

I may not want to write every day, but I have no choice - there are deadlines to meet.

Well working by yourself, especially when no one knows about it, is totally liberating because it's very impulse-driven. You work when you want to work. You work when you can work. No deadlines. No conversation. No compromise. No help.

Personally I find that deadlines are the best inspiration.

Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.

They thought I was deaf when I was a kid because I was always totally off in my own little world.

I think we really do need deaf people out there writing their own shows.