Sydney Pollack Quotes

Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don't know.

I wouldn't mind the rat race - if the rats would lose once in a while.

The creative act is also in a small way a suffering act - we start out with our ego, this hope of making this thing whatever it be, but so often it eludes us and it collapses and we kind of regress into this mental suffering, we can't find what we're looking for.

I've never made any picture, good or bad, without paying for it in emotional turmoil.

It seems like every time you come up something happens to bring you back down.

Every time I'm shooting a movie I want to kill myself. Because I don't see the light in the end of the tunnel.

Being constantly with children was like wearing a pair of shoes that were expensive and too small. She couldn't bear to throw them out, but they gave her blisters.

The price I have personally paid for these extra Sisyphean years has been prohibitive.

I am tired of having to prove myself constantly, even after being hired. Every single day, every single idea, I need to prove myself. I am tired of it!

I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it. (“Advance Notice”)

I put my heart, soul and tears into the game and this is what I get. I don't know what to do. My wife can't sleep at night. I hold my daughter all night. I am ashamed I played cricket.

When you create, it comes from this deep part of you, and your job is you, and so when you don't get heard it can feel bad and frustrating and you have to somehow keep the confidence up.

Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.

And the old horror of being a professional writer, and the usual stench of words that goes with it, is begining to drive me out of my seat. (Buddy)

There's way too much pain in this business for anyone who doesn't HAVE to write.

Words, words, words, a million million words circle in my head like hawks, waiting to dive onto the page to rend and tear the only two words I want to write. Why me?

I am tired of being tired and talking about how tired I am.

I think that gulf is what makes the work interesting, but as a creator it's endlessly frustrating because I'm starting out with this goal, this thing I'm trying to create, and then the thing I actually do create is very, very different. It's always painful, in some ways, especially when it's just finished.

I feel satisfaction at the end of the day when I've written a scene that I really like or when I write a good line of dialogue that I read out to my wife or something like that. But there's also days where it's just bloody agony and I go, 'ugh, this is such crap! Why did I think I had any talent?

I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.

I know I'm tired of thinking about what I should have done yesterday. I know I'm just tired. If I knew what to do with my life, how to fix it up, I would have done it a long time ago. You can't dig that? You think I want to live like I'm somebody's throwaway?

Life continues, and some mornings, weary of the noise, discouraged by the prospect of the interminable work to keep after, sickened also by the madness of the world that leaps at you from the newspaper, finally convinced that I will not be equal to it and that I will disappoint everyone - all I want to do is sit down and wait for evening. This is what I feel like, and sometimes I yield to it.

You know what? I was wrong. You are an idiot. My life happens to, on occasion, suck beyond the telling of it. Sometimes more than I can handle.

There's nothing more physically exhausting than a sense of failure.