Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

Artists of all disciplines must be willing to go into the dark, let go control, be surprised.

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

You can't buy something which does not exist. In a way, let's make things exist and then judge later. Don't cancel the process of creativity too early; let it flow.

Any creative process is about being in a territory which isn't secure, isn't necessarily familiar, and isn't convenient in any sort of way. And that's the excitement of it.

For me, every day is a new thing. I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did. And I get the sweats. I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going. If I knew where I was going I wouldn't do it.

No dance has ever turned out the way I thought it would, because I trust enough that I can start something with some ideas and then it takes itself somewhere.

I think the philosophy will continue to be what it always was; which was, let's keep throwing a bunch of things at the wall, and see what sticks.

You try a lot of things and you don't know what the hell you're doing. If you're actually inventing something you shouldn't know what you're doing.

None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.

Yes it was chaos, working through chaos, you never quite knew what you were going to do each day, but you knew that you wanted to make something.

It often feels like a tremendous amount of work is required to get an idea moving forward, like pushing a train uphill. But at a certain point, the thing takes on its own momentum, and takes unexpected turns. So it's that feeling of holding on, rather than pushing it, that is the most exciting thing. It's that need to occasionally bounce off the walls, letting anything happen for any reason, and having nothing to guide you that is the joy.

When you work with an actor and then you discover new things that are better, I think you gotta be free to be able to go with the new things that you're finding. I think that's very important. I have a strong idea when I go to shoot a movie but I also love to discover things when I'm on set as well.

Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out. You're curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you're waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.

The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control - to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children's cartoons or utopian novels. But it's just a fantasy.

To create something new is both thrilling and excruciating at the same time. It's great to have all these choices in front of you, and to have the writers in the room so you know exactly what they meant. But the downside is you want so badly not to screw it up!

I've always been somebody who, when I started a picture, never knew what the next picture would be.

You have to free your mind to do things you wouldn't think of doing. Don't ever say no.

I go into the whole composer thing quite open to keep on going and keep on trying different things because you never know... the next idea you have might be the one.

I know Charlie Kaufman really well, for instance. Charlie Kaufman starts a story, and he has no freaking idea where he's going. None. Zero. And he doesn't want to know, because there's a little bit of death in that.

We have the script, we have the actors, and we're trying to figure out what this is, and you don't know what it is. You have to be open to what it's going to become rather than have this thing that you're trying to get to, which is boring.

You know. I'll try anything. I'll do anything. I'll explore. Try different takes. All that kind of stuff to do sometimes, to do good performances, but always conducive to having a good time creatively.

Australians don't have a preconceived notion of what things have to be... we can go on a fantastic journey.

Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

It's an infinite creative universe to explore so why chase conservative options?