Nia Long Quotes

I try to look at the whole thing and say 'yes' to the projects that I cannot stop thinking about. If I read a script and the subject stays with me - then that's when I want to go to work.

My process of working is that I don't create a picture, I find it.

The best reason to make a film is that you feel passionately about it.

With directing, you've got to find something and drag it up from its inception, and I'm at the early stages of doing that again. There's something all-consuming and addictive about that.

You don't make a movie, the movie makes you.

For me it's all about personal vision; is there something about a subject that uniquely speaks to me.

Usually, you lose interest in a story beyond a certain point. But with 'Highway,' there was something very subtle, yet something very influential. I intended 'Highway' to be the first film that I ever made. Didn't happen.

An artist is nothing without his or her obsessions, and I have mine.

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.

I don't want to make a movie till I have an idea I have to make. I don't want to make a movie just to make a movie.

No matter how fast I could do it with the digital camera I don't think I would get the same thing out of it. The passion I have for formulating an idea stands alone. It is the important essence of what I do.

It is probably like an artist. They see in their head what they want to draw, and they draw it. It is like I have a feeling inside me that I want to create on a horse, and that is what I do.

Whether it's a TV show or a music video, the seed of the idea is what's driving my decisions, not the format or the outcome.

I don't think you could write fiction or create art unless you are sort of a positive person.

For me, it's always about the work and the stories I'm telling and the slices of life I feel should be illuminated.

I've always had a lot of story ideas rattling around in my head, but 'Nimona' felt very tangible very early. I knew the ending. So I just started making more and more pages, and then I made it a webcomic, like, 'OK, I'm really gonna do this.'

I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.

The concern about what's too violent or what's too scary is something that I just completely don't let enter into my creative process. I feel like, if I spend a lot of time trying to worry about whether it will appeal to everyone and who will like it and who won't, and I try to please everyone, I'll just spread myself too thin and lose my mind.

It's like something happened to you that caused you to do what you do...you heard something somewhere, you felt something about this music that was definitely part of your own vision. That's what the whole thing is like.

Thus far, everything I've made has come out of my really feeling it, out of the fire of my life.

I think all poems are commissioned. They just come to me without somebody outside commissioning them. The idea comes and I will live with them 'til I get it as close to what I mean. I've never been totally satisfied. I've come close a few times.

I made the flames lick the surface of the painting in such a way that is recorded the spontaneous traces of the fire. But what is it that provokes in me this pursuit of the impression of fire? Why must I search for its traces?

Maybe it's because it's connected to my childhood, or it's connected to the origins of what drove me creatively, but I feel like my life never makes more sense than when I'm in that process.

That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman--the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.

The how-to is all about day in, day out finding a way to feed the monster, the drive that lives inside.