Robert Rauschenberg Quotes

I think for every artist it's important to always keep this amount of doubt until the very last day of shooting.

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

When I write a play, and we read it for the first time, the great fear is that everybody is going to say, 'You're a bum and you can't write. This stinks.' and throw the script in the garbage. The great hope is that they're all going to lift me up on their shoulders and carry me to the streets, singing, 'He's a genius, he's a genius!'

So is fighting incompleteness the source of artistic neurosis? I doubt it. At most, this would apply to artists who deal with particular kinds of problems. I don't think we should think of Haydn or Mozart or Dickens or George Eliot in these terms.

I panic every time I put out a record. I think every artist does.

I go into every story thinking I'm going to fail. I think about that all the time - I think it's going to be terrible. Every story is like the first I've ever done.

My biggest worry is that we have to keep making good music, and I want to do well, but I wonder if I will be able to.

The nature of being an artist in any field, but specifically in comedy, is that almost as soon as you finish something you hate it, and it feels dated, and not your best work.

I struggle quite a lot in rehearsals, partly because I'm shy, partly because I still don't really understand the work that actors and directors do. I love the magic at the end, but the getting there - the wrong turns that are necessary to make something work - I find slightly beguiling and worrying.

I've never loved composing, because I feel like other people do it better.

You always feel a degree of insecurity about getting through a film.

I am always in self-doubt... every moment of my filmmaking. I am supremely confident when the story is being written and everything is in our head. But the moment we get into the filmmaking, I start doubting myself - from the camera angle to the re-recording to getting the actors to do their shots.

The worst time for me is in the final few hours of taking a track that you've worked on for two years and bouncing it down to the final stereo mix. The overwhelming emotion for me is complete and utter fear that I've made a mistake. I'm scared. Afterward, I obsess endlessly about it.

And there are lots of moments when I think, ‘What am I doing as an actor? I can’t act!’

The fact is that blank pages inspire me with terror. What will I put on them? Will it be good enough? Will I have to throw it out?

Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.

There are lots of different parts of movie-making that I participate in, but my favorite part is the making of it. I'm scared, every day. I keep thinking someone's going to throw me the ball and I'm going to go, "Oh, wow. Oh, god. I just messed that up."

I think anything that affects me in my personal life is going to help me be a better artist on stage.

I'm just scared of crowds. I just think people require things of me whenever there's a screaming crowd, and I always think I won't be able to provide what they want, so that's why I look scared all the time.

I think any time you set out to make something, anybody is going to be confronted by those voices in their head that say "You don't need to do this. Someone else can do this better. You should probably just quit right now."

People ask, "Do you enjoy acting?" But you only have those specific few hours to do a scene, and then you drive home and wait for six months to find out how it went. You can't go back and put in a new idea. Filming is about continuing to be alert and to think, and I find it quite exhausting. Certainly I would say that fear is a part of that.

As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that's no guarantee you'll create anything worth all your effort. You're always haunt by the idea you're wasting your life.

The thing that I'm just scared to death of is that someday I'm going to wake up and bore somebody with a film.

Every time I make a movie I think that it's going to be my last one, I think that no one is going to show up. I always have this sense that they're all going to fail. I am scared to death.

What still concerns me the most is: am I on the right track, am I making progress, am I making mistakes in art?