“Spontaneity is a wonderful thing, but if it doesn't come, you have to have an elaborate plan as a backup.”
– Jean Renoir
William DeMille to Brother Cecil B., disparaging Cecil as he made his first movie (The Squaw Man) in 1913. He wrote that Cecil would only be “teasing nickels and dimes out of the mentally immature, by making photographs leap and prance”.
“I do not always know what I want, but I do know what I don’t want.”
– Stanley Kubrick
“You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.”
– Pablo Picasso
“I think what we need is seriously engaged art, that can teach us again that we're smart.”
– David Foster Wallace
“There's no such thing as a wrong note in music. It all depends on how you resolve it.”
– Art Tatum
“That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.”
– Ray Bradbury
“Play louder! Play louder! Jerry Garcia, smiling beatifically, steps to the mike and explains very gently, “No, no, man, you don’t understand, this is the part where we play soft and you listen loud!”
“Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.”
– Jean Cocteau
“If you know where you're going, it's not worth doing.”
– Frank Gehry
“Staying true to your best impulses will decide your capacity to recognize opportunity when it comes.”
– Robert Hunter
“Only the morally courageous are worthy of speaking to their fellow men for two hours in the dark. And only the artistically incorrupt will earn and keep the people’s trust.”
– Frank Capra
“It is the writer’s job, if he cannot write a masterpiece, at least to avoid writing junk.”
– Robert Giroux
“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.”
– Robert Hughes
“People who do not break things first will never learn to create anything.”
– Tagalog proverb
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”
– Flannery O’Connor
“The three things you can't fake are erections, competence, and creativity.”
– Douglas Coupland
“It’s easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup than to turn fish soup into an aquarium.”
– Russian Proverb
“A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it.”
– Roger Ebert
“The world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
– W. B. Yeats
Hunter Thompson's definition of "Gonzo”: "Learning how to fly as you're falling.”
“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”
– Andre Gide
“It's not where you take things from -- it's where you take them to.”
– Jean Luc Godard
“The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame.”
– Salman Rushdie
“ For some people, art is a complicated way of saying very simple things. For us, it is a simple way of saying very complicated things.”
– Jean Coucteau
“It is the eye which makes the horizon.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“People pay to see others believe in themselves.”
– Kim Gordon