I like having my hands in the clay. I like the movie-making process.

You know, as a writer, I’m more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.

When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

I used to like to set different film clips to classical music, not even my own songs, but make little movies.

You don’t have to be scared of me, because I am loyal. Why are people so scared of creative ideas and so scared of truth? All I want to do is do good.

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

I like entertaining people. I really miss it.

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

There are only 3 colors, 10 digits, and 7 notes; its what we do with them that’s important.

I have been trying to retire to the back of the camera for quite a few years, and in 1970, when I first started directing, I said, ‚If I could pull this off, I can some day move to the back of the camera and stay there.‘

The thing that makes my clothes really different is that, number one, they are really great designs; they’re not tacky; they are very professional; the design is made from lots of decisions.

Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‚the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.‘ The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‚Artist.‘

There’s people constantly asking you for something on set, so the multi-tasking of motherhood transfers very well to being a director. And I think you’re compassionate.

I knew early on that I wanted to entertain in some form. And I knew I would work as hard as anyone to do it.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

Software constraints are only confining if you use them for what they’re intended to be used for.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

I wish I could make music about politics. I feel like it’s such an art and a talent that I admire tremendously, but when I step into the studio, I step out of the real world, and it’s therapeutic.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

I don’t know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn’t hurt the book.

I’ve done films where we don’t rehearse, and I’ve done films where we heavily rehearse. I like rehearsals.

Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

Young people are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and more fit for new projects than for settled business.

Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art.

When I was a kid, I thought movies just came from air. I thought they just appeared.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

There’s something about being in front of a live audience that’s fun. It’s a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can’t get it anywhere else. And I’ve been doing it since I was 23, so it’s part of my being – it’s part of my fabric as a person.

We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe.

Writing is like a ‚lust,‘ or like ‚scratching when you itch.‘ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

In westerns, you meet a hardy bunch of characters. There is no jealousy on such pictures.

Writing is like anything else – the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you’ll be about what’s going to happen to it, where it’s going, what it sounds like, whether it’s right.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

If I’m inspired to make a certain kind of song, I’m going to make that kind of song, no matter if it’s what they know me as or think I am.

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

I used to – my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I’ve always heard kind of melodies in my head.

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity – and I don’t mean simple – it’ll be good, and the public will know it.

Genius, when young, is divine.

There has to be something in every role that interests you.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

If I weren’t performing, I’d be a beauty editor or a therapist. I love creativity, but I also love to help others. My mother was a hairstylist, and they listen to everyone’s problems – like a beauty therapist!

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

In the future, you won’t buy artists‘ works; you’ll buy software that makes original pieces of ‚their‘ works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.

Every time I make American film I just trust American directors and American writers.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

When we talk about how movies used to be made, it was over 100 years of film, literal, physical film, with emulsion, that we would expose to light and we would get pictures.

Music is something no one can control.