Edouard Manet Quotes

Herman Melville said that artists have to take a dive and either you hit your head on a rock and you split your skull and you die … or that blow to the head is so inspiring that you come back and do the best work that you ever did. BUT you have to take the dive and you do not know what the results will be.

Making art is nothing but risk, always. If it's not risk, it's no good.

I'm widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I'm not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.

There's no way to really mock up or simulate what I'm doing until I'm there. An exhibition for me is not a statement but an experiment.

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.

I want to be scared. I want to keep taking insane risks. I want to be scared because you're going to grow through that whether you want to or not. I don't want to play the same guy. I want to keep throwing curveballs to you guys and keep telling stories.

I love to get to that place where I don't know what kind of music I'm doing; I don't know if it's any good. I don't know if it's anything. It's a big question mark. The idea is to have interesting results. That's my bottom line.

When I'm making stuff, the thing that excites me most is not the result, but the process and trying to do something I've never done before.

Half of art is accident, but there is no accident without free experiment.

The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight.

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

If there was no risk, it wouldn't be art. It wouldn't be worth making. There is risk even in a fairy tale. Fiction is closest to pure narrative, and pure narrative is simply the logic we try to impose on an ever-changing reality.

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen... that if painters did know what was going to happen they wouldn't bother to do it.

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.

As a writer, you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're just doing it. You hope it works out well.

There can't be art without risk. It's like saying No Sex, and then expecting there to be children.

If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already – the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of.

I always felt that if you're not trying something different each time out of the gate, you're being safe, and you don't ever want to find that place of safety. I like that, each time, before I even go in front of the cameras, the studio's reaction will be fear.

I've never really had a certain style of music in mind that I make, or am really adamant on how something should sound, but I like the process of not knowing, of just seeing what happens and what comes out.

What's interesting about making art is that you take everything you know about it and you bring it up to that point, and you start making a physical thing that addresses what that is. And when you do it, you don't know anything about it - if it's going to work or not work.

You hope that the ideas will come together. You just don't know. That's part of what I suppose is part of being brave and putting creative work out there.

If you set your bar at 'amazing' it's awfully difficult to start. Your first paragraph, sketch, formula, sample or concept isn't going to be amazing. Your tenth one might not be either. Confronted with the gap between your vision of perfect and the reality of what you've created, the easiest path is no path. Shrug. Admit defeat. Hit delete. One more reason to follow someone else and wait for instructions. Of course, the only path to amazing runs directly through not-yet-amazing. But not-yet-amazing is a great place to start, because that's where you are.

I tell the actors that the biggest gift they can give me is to fail. And that the second gift they can give me is to surprise me.