Louis MacNeice Quotes

The thing that is so touching about - I can come right up and call him Mr. Simon. The thing that's great about Mr. Simon is he really uses the audience as a partner, and they tell him what's working and what's not. So he's always working on a play.

If you're making entertainment on a grand scale, if you're reaching millions, there will be tens of thousands of people who absolutely hate us, and some percentage of those will take it upon themselves to let us known how they feel.

In some ways, it's more rewarding to hear someone interpret a piece of music that you're a part of.

The audience is never wrong.

What I love about making movies is that it's a collaboration. It's one of the most rewarding things, to create something and have someone show you something that you didn't see, and vice versa.

Not everybody is going to like what I do or get what I do. With as much positive, you always get the negative to deal with. I get that as well. Most of the time, I'm very honored to have a fan base that they react to my songs. My songs speak to a lot of them.

I've always liked playing with somebody else and collaborating, just to get out of my own head all the time. Everybody does, but artists especially, we torture ourselves. So it's good for me to immerse myself in somebody else's work.

I write all my scripts with Salman in mind. He understands me perfectly on the sets.

I want to make my kind of films but make them work commercially, too. When my presentation meets the director's imagination, the result will be great.

In the study of the fine arts, they mutually assist each other.

I think the writer is always the creator, because he's starting with nothing, but the actor comes in and gives flesh and blood.

I only ever asked two people to work with me as a partner. One was Paul McCartney and the other Yoko Ono. Paul and me were the Beatles.

For me, it was all about working with an inspirational filmmaker.

It's as if Thomas Kinkade and Dante were at a party, and one turned to the other sometime after midnight and uttered that classic line "You know, we really should work together sometime.

Screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.

It takes two to paint. One to paint, the other to stand by with an axe to kill him before he spoils it.

I had paid for my folly and, as a reward, was invited to take part in the nest builder’s performance piece. The script was great. ‘When I bleat here, do you want me to just bleat or to really let go and “bleat, bleat”?’ I asked. ‘I feel like “bleat, bleating,” but if Mother/Destroyer is going to be crawling through the birth canal of concertina wire, I don’t want to steal focus, you know what I mean?

It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one.

A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.

I discovered very soon, especially for movies, because I started in theater, that every director has his own universe. You have to be free enough to try to understand what he wants from you. Especially when that director has a tremendous personality. And I'm talking about people like Pedro Almodovar and Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino and Woody Allen. And you have to adapt. If you don't adapt to them, you are off the thing.

[Liv Corfixen] very much part of my life in that she's everything in my life and we found a way to use each other much more on a creative level as well. She was kind of the idea for this movie so I wanted to acknowledge that. She gave me the original idea to make the film.

When people decide to talk publicly about poetry as an art form and how it's received, they often get very abject about it: "Nobody reads poetry," and then a thousand people write back, "No, we read poetry." There's an abundance of this negative preaching to the choir, and it's very similar to the experience I'm having.

I just wish that I had a part in everything Aaron Sorkin wrote. Sometimes I wish I was a member of an acting troupe where we all just kept working together, the same people. I can't, unfortunately, be in everything he writes. I'm excited for him, but I'm jealous that I wasn't a part of it.

The critiques I received from my father's community didn't actually have to do with any of the things I'd been afraid of - spiritual or cultural aspects - they were more annoyed that I'd killed off this character or those characters hadn't hooked up or I'd done an open ending and it didn't give them a sense of closure that they were expecting.

What will they say about my poetry who never touched my blood?