Nadine Gordimer Quotes

I never set out to make a movie that was everything to everybody; if that were the case, we could all just take a picture of a tree and agree that the tree is beautiful and move on with our lives. I wouldn't even need to show up.

Artists should never look at pictures, but should stutter in a language of their own.

You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.

I write about what I want to write about, and so the film comes out as a very personal expression even if its subject matter is totally prefabricated.

When you draw, you copy the world don't you? You remake it on paper, but it isn't the same. It's yours. No one else could have created it just like that. When I make poems, I use the words we all use, but the order and the sound create a new power. This wood is someone's creation. We stumble through it's tendrils, as if we're crawling through the synapses of his mind.

The way I work is not the way that you work, and the whole point of any creative act is that. What I have to offer is me, what you have to offer is you, and if you offer yourself with authenticity and generosity I will be moved.

Photographers who come up with power never get accused of imitating anyone else even though they photograph the same broom, same street, same portraits.

An artist must find his expression closely linked to his individual experience or else follow in the old grooves resulting in lifeless forms.

Don't worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can't help doing. If you write enough, you draw enough, you'll have a style, whether you want it or not. Don't worry about whether you're "commercial". Tell your own stories, draw your own pictures. Let other people follow you.

My style is personal, my style of writing is personal, and I believe in that. I believe what comes out of me is an individual thing, and that's why I, I believe in the individual.

The worst thing you can do to anybody trying to be creative is to demand participation in their vision.

But what I realized when I was looking back at them was that no matter how different they are, they're still coming from me, and they're still coming from my brain and my set of obsessions. I think that no matter how different I tried to make them, there were just these certain questions that I just kept circling back to as I was writing. I think they were the ones I was really swept up in in that decade.

My own thing is in my head. I hear sounds and if I don't get them together nobody else will.

The challenge for an artist is always to find your own way of doing something.

If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copy

As a director, you try to find what is creative.

I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.

Every movie has its uniqueness. You just do your best and go with it.

But I'm the only one who can paint the moon, because I'm the only one who knows whether that's right or not.

I really don't think of my work in terms of a genre. I think of it in terms of what I want to say, what I think is cool, and what I'm good at.

Even if you try to copy a film shot by shot, you still can't. It's still your own film.

No one was creating and I always wanted to be created on.

As long as you're true to you, you believe it and you make others believe it, then what you're doing is just art. If you give everybody a blank canvas and some paint, not everybody's picture is going to be exactly the same, but it's still art. I just do what I do.

If you are a creative person, you try to create things that are an extension of yourself.