Joe Mantello Quotes

The studio is a laboratory, not a factory. An exhibition is the result of your experiments, but the process is never-ending. So an exhibition is not a conclusion.

I can't just go into the studio with one idea and be all in on that, 100 percent. It takes me a while to arrive at something that feels like it's finished.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

Brian Eno developed systems to keep himself on edge and to keep himself in a position where he's generating ideas.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That's why I keep making them.

I had a teacher in art school who said something about the only works he really enjoyed seeing or found much in were works where he had a sense that a discovery was made in the course of making this object. I like to hold to that as my marching orders.

It is important to make your own stuff. Even if you are not an actor, it is important to not stop involving yourself as a creative person.

I've had the thought that a person's 'artistic vision' is really just the cumulative combination of whatever particular stances he has sincerely occupied during his creative life - even if some of those might appear contradictory.

I don't start a piece knowing exactly what effect it's going to have. There is a seed of an idea that I could never articulate, right at the beginning of the piece, literally like one cell.

I'm not the kind of artist who has an idea and then carries it out; it's more like I find what the idea was through doing the paintings.

Raising a child is a little like Picasso's work; in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he had the rules down pat.

If the playwright knew every little thing about his play, why bother? There must be discovery all the time, otherwise why bother to do it?

There were times in 'Adaptation' during the editing where I really thought, 'Okay, well, this was a noble failure. I tried to do something good, but this is not going to work.'

I don't think it's that strange that a show has sort of a bumpy beginning. It's just part and parcel of the process.

I want to try it to see what it's like and see what my stuff looks like when I take it from inception to completion.

One does not set out with the idea that I've just had a great idea and now I'm going to go and carry it out. Almost all art that's made like that doesn't go anywhere.

Each film I make changes me in some way. When I start the picture I'm one person and by the time I finish I'm another.

Not content, but the road the artist takes, is the interesting part.

That first writing session, what Dan Hill calls a creative blind date, is always a real challenge, and you bring that back to your partner when you return to writing with them.

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

The more I draw and write, the more I realise that accidents are a necessary part of any creative act, much more so than logic or wisdom. Sometimes a mistake is the only way of arriving at an original concept, and the history of successful inventions is full of mishaps, serendipity and unintended results.

I think that things like Twitter and the blogosphere are so instantaneously critical that I think it's actually created a bit of a culture of artistic fear to branch out too much because you don't want to be slammed.

I did this play, 'Expedition 6,' that I worked on for three years in between other things. It was a good, interesting time for me because I trained as a theater director, and I went back, and we toured it around.