Issey Miyake Quotes

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

Writing is a discipline: it's almost all about holding back.

Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else's aesthetics. I think you're born an artist or not. I couldn't have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.

I'm one of those artists who, if you'd let me tweak, would probably keep going and going, so it comes to the point where sometimes you just have to let go and make the decision, 'Okay, that's it.'

Rules limit you, and once you start thinking about what the audience wants or expects, it becomes a trap that a lot of artists fall into.

If you have total freedom to design, you won't get anything interesting. So I give myself restraints in order to kind of push myself through, to create something new. It's the torture that I give myself, the pain and the struggle that I go through. So it's self-given, but that's the only way, I think, to make a strong, good new creation.

In an animated film you can do whatever you want, but that doesn't mean you should do everything you want.

I am a believer in discipline; it takes a lot to do well. You need discipline for those little excursions into the chaotic that make life interesting.

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.

I think I've realized that when you are aiming to create a real body of work, you are as much defined by the things you don't do as by the things you do.

It's not that I don't want to become famous or that I'm obsessed by my work as an actress, but it's all about not limiting myself, such as putting myself in a little jail that I can escape from.

You're supposed to be a control freak when you're an artist. That's the whole point of having a vision: Why have one if you're not going to protect it?

In order to understand what they need to understand, in order to write what they write, they have to be free. And yet, they aren't ever free. They are not free because they are not free of the constrictions their art puts on them.

It is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself.

I had made all these rules for myself: I'm not writing social commentary, I'm not writing love songs.

I'm a big believer in creating parameters for creativity. I think parameters make people more creative. So that starts with my budgets. I only do low budget movies, and I think that makes the movies better.

Human nature is you get carried away, so we have to protect ourselves from ourselves.

I think it's important to know your limitations too.

We all have to recognize, no matter how great our strength, we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please.

You have to have a certain amount of limitations, I think, to make art and to make something that can be alive on film. Money can get in the way of that.

I always feel like there's some behaviour that we're all capable - we have our inhibitions protecting from indulging in certain appetites or developing certain appetites.

I like restraint. Even with actors, restraint is something that I work on the most.

I can only control what I can, which is what I'm able to do as an artist.

I learned that I can't be as indulgent as I'd like to be when I record.

The idea of self-government is foreign to Americans. ... Self-government is a form of self-control, self-limitation. It goes against our whole grain. We're supposed to go after what we want, not question whether we really need it.