Quotes About Creativity

Once I'd become a songwriter, it just stays with you. You always want to write more songs because it's such a great feeling.

I am trying to do films that stay with me for some time. 'Banaras' stays with me.

Every now and again, something will pop into my head when I'm driving or I'm in the shower, you'll just get an image and it stays with you. It doesn't have to be much, it doesn't have to be a story, it could just be an image. But it won't leave your head and that's when you know you've got something.

Stand-up is one of the art forms where you don't have to look nice, and I hope it stays that way.

Whatever form of hip-hop you like, man, love it and keep it going. Keep it strong. Make sure it stays powerful.

One of the things I learned very early on was that if you cast the show correctly, and if you've created the right energy in the room, the solution is also in the room. The solution doesn't necessarily come from someone, but if everybody is working in a very steadfast and rigorous way, then everything you're looking for is in the room.

I want to be a playwright the way people are bank tellers. I want to keep doing it and have it go steadily and smoothly.

There's a steady forward march of a creative process that some of us stay with and don't give up - that should be an admirable thing - from Louis Armstrong to Charlie Parker to Miles to Ornette and some people who are not even known today - some kids coming up - people who are out to change the world.

Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder.

It's pretty rare in jazz to have a full-on steady band.

I try to keep a steady pace with my writing. I have found that super-productive days are usually followed by two and even three days when I can hardly write a word. I used to try for 1000 words a day; now I am high-fiving myself after 500.

I'm steady trying to make this bounce stuff mainstream and do some wonderful and great things for the culture of New Orleans.

Enough of the formulaic stuff. I am not saying pot-boilers are going to stop coming, but there should be other quality-centric films to off-set them, to maintain a steady balance.

How many ways can you cut a steak? How many ways can a chord go? I've been in this business so long, I know how to cut it.

I steal from every movie ever made.

You have to steal a lot. You have to have a criminal mentality to be a film director.

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

If I could steal someone's dream myself, I'd have to go for one of Orson Welles.

Blake is damned good to steal from.

Good poets borrow; great poets steal.

I feel able to steal from Emily Dickinson because she's both wonderful and dead.

You can always make a film somehow. You can beg, borrow, steal the equipment, use credit cards, use your friends' goodwill, wheedle your way into this or that situation. The real problem is, how do you get people to see it once it is made?

Someone gave me a piece of advice once, my first manager Lucien Hold. He said, 'If you do stand-up about your own life, no one can steal it.' I always thought that was the best piece of advice.

I spent a lot of time drawing and writing little comic books, and my mom was a rapper, so I would steal her instrumentals.