Quotes About Creation

The songs come along at their own pace when they are ready.

I wanted to express myself more fully through writing and directing. It just feels like a package deal. Anytime you create anything, you try to exert mastery over your world.

Living organisms are created by chemistry. We are huge packages of chemicals.

I live for the blank page.

Once you're directing, you're kind of in a certain mode, where you're taking whatever is on the page and forming it into the film that you think it might want to be. So whether it's my writing or not, I still try to work with it in the same way.

I build my characters from the day they're born to the first page of the script.

When I write, the first blank page, or any blank page, means nothing to me. What means something is a page that has been filled with words.

This basic thing I always do: 'What happened between the character's birth, and page one of the script?' Anything that's not in the story, I'll fill in the blanks.

The writer creates the role on the page and then the actor takes it and makes it their own.

The key thing is that you start every film from sort of a blank page, almost like you discover it like a child discovers a new world.

One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.

I love... What's gratifying to me is when you make/create a character and a human being, a person who lives entirely and who has their own existence, just merely from the words on a page.

What you write on the page has nothing to do with when you're on set. When you're on set, it has nothing to do with when you're in the editing room. And when you're in the editing room, it has nothing to do with the final movie. You just have to let it go.

Having something commissioned made it easier for me to share my work and see it out there and have people read it without feeling like there was a piece of my soul on the page.

I come from the place where I am thinking 'I have put my blood on the pages.'

I always sent my mother all these huge books I made. When my mother died, I was cleaning her cupboard, and these big books were only 20 pages long.

I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I've already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That's very discouraging. I hate the book at that point.

And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters.

I think a 23-page ordinary comic is an investment for the artist, but if you're doing something 60 to 104 pages, that's a really big investment for an artist. So unless you've got someone who wants to pay you while you're doing it or up front, it's kind hard to get someone to do that with you, unless you're the artist yourself.

Usually, when I write a novel, it takes me about 100 pages to figure out the voice of the narrator.

Creative output, you know, is just pain. I'm going to be cliche for a minute and say that great art comes from pain.

From such a gentle thing, from such a fountain of all delight, my every pain is born.

We're all making castles in the sand, wonderful tapestries, an exquisite corpse. But is it meaningful? No. It's dogs barking. It doesn't mean anything beyond our yelping, at the pain of being alive.

I didn't have to say it. I just had to write it. It was painful enough.