Kevin Parker Quotes

When we think about the past, we think, 'It must have been so boring.' It's actually not.

One of the reasons for going back into the past is that it's almost the only place that there's any drama.

If the only new thing we have to offer is an improved version of the past, then today can only be inferior to yesterday. Hypnotized by images of the past, we risk losing all capacity for creative change.

If the future, as imagined in literature, is really the present taken to extremes, then the past is also the present, but boiled down.

I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.

Sometimes it takes looking at the past to really be able to move forward and learn from it.

What was good enough for my father is good enough for me" is a treasured English axiom which, if strictly carried out, would have kept us to wooden ploughs and water clocks. In these days we need to be inoculated with some of the nervous energy of the Americans.

We have a tendency in Quebec - and I include myself in this - to describe ourselves using the past. We're always nostalgic.

Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.

Every now and then, someone comes along - we used to call it 'New Jack' - tries to do something new, tries to take all the credit, without acknowledging the past.

This is what I always tell my filmmakers-you have to do tons of research, because you don't know where the inspiration is going come from.

Copy, not from your industry, from others. You have to go where there is no competition.

Every individual who is not creative has a negative, narrow, exclusive taste and succeeds in depriving creative being of its energy and life.

What makes a good work of art is something that honors certain traditions and breaks with others.

Artists who approach perfection do not have many ideas.

I'm sick of remakes, how about something different. That's the thing - people always come to me and are like 'what do you want to remake, we know we can get that greenlight, what do you want to make?' I don't want to remake a g-d damn focking think.

The artist who is after success lets himself be influenced by the public. Generally such an artist contributes nothing new, for the public acclaims only what it already knows, what it recognizes.

You think you've made something really great, but there's a reason why it's not resonating the way some previous work did. But it's not that easy to just replicate. Some people think, "Oh, just go do that thing you used to do before." But it just doesn't work like that. It's a lot more mysterious or slippery.

A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave.

To exact of every man who writes that he should say something new, would be to reduce authors to a small number; to oblige the most fertile genius to say only what is new, would be to contract his volumes to a few pages. Yet, surely, there ought to be some bounds to repetition; libraries ought no more to be heaped for ever with the same thoughts differently expressed, than with the same books differently decorated.

"Where do you get your ideas?" That's the one question I'm genuinely sick of being asked, and also genuinely fascinated by. What fascinates me is not that people ask the question, but what kind of answer are they really looking for? Because if I tell them the truth, which is "I make them up," they seem very disappointed. They want to know about the trek I do once a year to the mountain.

Hollywood. It lacks originality. Remake sucks.' But I had to look deeper into it from my own perspective. We are not trying to compete with the original at all and that's what allowed me to pull the trigger without any hesitancy.

Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it before.

While most people in the arts think they have to be constantly looking forward to be edgy and creative....the real secret of creativity is to go back and remember.