Quotes About Creativity

Writer's block is a phony, made up, BS excuse for not doing your work.

I like to work in costumes, makeup, and hair that allow me tremendous freedom.

I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for 'The Namesake,' I felt that it had to be a novel - it couldn't work as a story.

For me, naming bands was the forerunner to really writing lyrics, because I work off titles.

You know when I think about what I'm doing - what I'm doing and the way I'm doing it is more important to me than any amount of money or anything like that because it's my artistic work.

I would love to work with Nickleback. I think they're an incredible band. One of my favorites.

I have several writer friends, but I don't involve them in my work process. I'm more likely to talk about the business of publishing with them.

If you have a great work in your head, nothing else thrives near it; all other thoughts are repelled, and the pleasure of life itself is for the time lost.

Out of the work comes the work.

The responsibility of the artist consists in perfecting his work so that it may become attractively disinteresting.

I do not consider myself at work unless I am before a six-foot canvas.

I seem to get the best work when I'm angry and depressed and alienated.

I have improved the way in which I paint. The colours are cleaner and there is more energy in the brush work.

I feel that my job is to create an atmosphere where creative people can do their best work.

One must be just a little crazy to write a great novel. One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one's being to take over the work from time to time.

Every quirky girl doesn't have to be the best-friend character. It's a very limiting and self-fulfilling prophecy. People only write things that will get green-lit, so they write to those stereotypes.

As an actor, you break stereotypes all the time.

Normally you read a screenplay - and I read a lot of them - and the characters don't feel like people. They feel like plot devices or cliches or stereotypes.

We have to allow ourselves the freedom to make mistakes, including cultural mistakes, in our first drafts. I believe it's okay to get cultural details wrong in your first draft. It's okay if stereotypes emerge. It just means that your experience is limited, that you're human.

A lot of hard work goes into making a film. It's not all fun time, as people tend to think. There are always stereotypes attached to every profession, but I found out this industry breaks them all.

That's one of the things I really respect and admire about 'Doctor Who', is that they're always thinking out of the box with the characters they write and the actor they employ to portray them. They're always challenging the stereotypes and peoples' way of thinking.

You don't need to be a stereotypical basketball player to be successful. You can be yourself. You can kick it with artists, you can kick it with nerds.

Doing the stereotypical solo bores me.

What I think happens today is that a lot of filmmakers look at other films that are retro pieces, like L.A. Confidential, and say, oh, that's period. We didn't want to do the stereotypical stuff.