Jim McKay Quotes

Look around at day-to-day life for ideas, and it finds its way into your work.

I'm constantly trying to strip away layers of perceived thought or cliche.

I really believe that a writer is someone who has trained their mind to misbehave.

Art-making was part of my daily life from a very young age, and I still love that kind of everyday art-making.

I like to write songs about what's happening, what I see around me and what I hear. Everyday life. Someone may be talking to me and I may take it from that.

I take my inspiration for the song writing from little experiences, not even if I've experienced them myself but say if something has made me sad, I will use that emotion. I just use everyday life and write about it.

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

You learn on every film so much.

It's always a learning experience every time I'm on set.

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

My real thinking and planning gets done when I'm doing something else like driving or walking or taking the shower.

I've actually always started with what feels most natural. Which is, the people who surround me in my daily life. So, the first show I ever wrote, which is called 'Surface Transit,' was based in part on people I knew from my family. Co-workers, ex-boyfriends. All of that kind of thing.

With science it's very important not to go down the wrong path, but the wrong path in science is a path you go down where everything you learn is already known. So you need to steer around the obvious.

I learn from every movie I do because on every movie I have a different experience.

I wanted to be a writer as a teen... so storytelling was my first love. In my late teens, design became an obsession as I realized that I could express myself through the medium. Much later, when I founded Fuseproject in 1999, our slogan became 'design brings stories to life.'

I never went to acting school, so improv was my training. Just being quick on your feet helps in everyday life.

There is no such thing as an average person. They really are guidelines for people to grapple with the unknown, and we can always surprise expectations.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.

You have to be willing to ask questions that almost no one else would ask.

Following my muse has worked out pretty well so far. I can't see any reason to change the formula now.

Creating the album 'VIBES' has been the biggest life lesson I have ever learned.

Sometimes I like to list the strongest arguments I can find to support a point of view I think is wrong. When I have them before me, I am up against a real opponent rather than a hypothetical one that is an easy target for me to hit.

Most of the basic truths of life sound absurd at first hearing.