Paul Thomas Anderson Quotes

Anyone who does anything creative is always gonna want to change.

You have to always work against what you did before, and even against your taste.

Movie-wise, there is nothing I wouldn't do again. It's not possible to make one perfect movie every time.

Every time I write a new book, I want to push myself to try something different.

Obviously, I never want to make the same record twice. I want to keep moving forward. That's the real challenge, I think.

I think it's important to evolve and make a different record every time as an artist.

I like challenges. If you're involved, as one is, in filmmaking, you want to challenge yourself. You don't want to repeat what you're done before.

What drives me is to still feel creative and like I'm pushing myself as an artist.

I think that all my albums are different enough where I don't feel like I did this the last time.

I keep pushing buttons and trying to grow as a person and as a filmmaker.

Hopefully with each thing that you do you're learning something, you're growing, and you're pushing yourself a little harder in some way or another. So I think you'd be in real trouble if each new thing that you create didn't feel like 'Oh, wow. I feel like I'm doing something a little different this time.'

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

My work is of me; it's not me. I want it to be far more extraordinary than I am.

What an artist learns matters little. What he himself discovers has a real worth for him, and gives him the necessary incitement to work.

And doing so you can recreate yourself and you can also come up with something that is not only original and creative and artistic, but also maybe even decent, or moral if I can use words like that, or something that's like basically good.

Some people only work to recorded music because it's so reliable and exactly the same every time, which is exactly why I don't.

So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject. But it's hard, because everybody has style. You can't help it.

I've had to keep exploring different ways of presenting the music so I don't repeat myself.

I never want to repeat myself. I can't imagine anything else as upsetting as realizing I'm redoing something I did before. For some reason, when it comes to film, I'm very good at not repeating myself. Even though in the rest of my life, I'm constantly repeating my mistakes.

To swear off making mistakes is very easy. All you have to do is swear off having ideas.

Every time you work, you have to do it all over again, to rid yourself of this dross. I suppose for a person who is not an artist or not attempting art, it is not dross, because it is the common exchange of everyday life.

Every time I make a film, I feel it gives me the chance to learn something new.

If you want to be an artist in the long run, it isn't necessarily a good axiom to repeat formulas over and over until they're used up.

When you make movies, it's such an important period of time, when you look back at each one of them. You want to be able to say that you did something that was a challenge and that changed you.

I've learned that you can do something great, but you have to continue reinventing yourself as an artist. So by the time someone else is copying your style, you have something else to offer your audience.