Maurice Sendak Quotes

I love illustrating for other writers because I am given stories I never would have thought of, and my work as an illustrator is always in support of the story.

One longs for a director with a sense of imagination.

Every time I get a script it's a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It's like falling in love. You can't give a reason why.

With directing, you've got to find something and drag it up from its inception, and I'm at the early stages of doing that again. There's something all-consuming and addictive about that.

Cartoonists' dirty secret is that we tend to come up with stories that involve things that are really fun to draw.

For years, I was watching other people have so much fun playing out their version of authorship, like Louis C.K. and Larry David. As I watched them do their thing, I began to pine for the days when I had a lot less expected of me and, often, a lot more creative freedom. The courage that those guys have is always captivating to me.

I look at the film as an opportunity to see some bountifully creative minds do something that I could not do - tell the story with images. I can't wait to see what they do.

Mozart and Neil Diamond may have begun with the same idea, but that a work of art is more than an idea is confirmed by the difference between the 'Soave sia il vento' and 'Kentucky Woman.' We have different words for 'art' and 'idea' because they are two different things.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.' My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.

Directing is really exciting. In the end, it's more fun to be the painter than the paint.

When you make illustrations, you're supposed to have a subtext; you're not just communicating words - you're actually adding another story altogether.

It's so difficult to actually come up with ideas that you really fall in love with, you know? That's the most difficult thing about filmmaking - and that's my main challenge in life.

I'm not the guy who does slo-mo, or I'm not the guy who does splashing rain or doves flying or anything; that's not me. Every film, I try and make it the way I see it in my head, and it really just depends on the script and the people I'm working with or whatever interests me at that particular time.

Our brains have this habit of quilting dreams from the fabrics of our lives. As a filmmaker, I get to do it for a living.

In a lot of ways, the cool thing about modeling is that other people and artists I look up to are able to project their artistic visions onto me, and it was really exciting to be a muse in that way and carry out a vision.

Some directors are like poets.

It's always an amazing gift to be able to work with storytellers who 'get it' and who can not only draw anything but can draw it better and more dynamically than you'd ever envisioned.

I'm just making 'Threadworlds' out of the things I love and that I'm passionate about learning. When we created 'Avatar,' Michael DiMartino and I did the same thing.

It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes.

Artists aren't looking for you to write them something; they're looking for you to give them something new.

I believe in previous lives and the Muse—and that books and music exist before they are written and that they are propelled into material being by their own imperative to be born, via the offices of those willing servants of discipline, imagination and inspiration whom we call artists.

I have no imagination; I just steal from life and change the color. Then it's a comic book.

Artistic vision is having the clarity to fall in love with what you see.

The true painter must be able, with the most usual things, to have the most unusual ideas.

the process of a book's coming to life is not fully complete until your imagination meets mine on the page. The words evoke pictures and something altogether new is created, something different from the limits of my own skills and imagination. Something that is a marriage between your heart, mind, and body - and mine.