Peter Marino Quotes

I've seen stand up comedy, and after a while you start to notice that a lot of people are doing things that are like a lot of other people. There can be a bit of a herd mentality, and that's obviously less interesting because there's less going on. I'm just being totally frank with you.

In art, theories are as useful as a doctor's prescription; one must be sick to believe them.

If you're always thinking about someone else's work, about the tradition you're working in, how can you possibly make anything good?

I've never sampled just one artist, I'm known for my reputation and my creativity.

Genius is talent provided with ideals. Genius starves while talent wears purple and fine linen. The man of genius of today will infifty years' time be in most cases no more than a man of talent.

Don't listen to those who say, you taking too big a chance. Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor, and it would surely be rubbed out by today.

Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they're seeing now, what we'll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.

The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.

What is perfection, anyway? It's the death of creativity.

It is a function of creative men to perceive the relations between thoughts, or things, or forms of expression that may seem utterly different, and to be able to combine them into some new form. Britten's Nocturne, for example, which unifies musically a group of poems by different hands, is a notable example of his power to connect the seemingly unconnected.

A great artist ... takes what he did not make and makes of it something that only he can make.

Imposing an alleged uniform general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all but the very exceptional. And measuring originality by deviation from the mass breeds eccentricity in them.

Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copy

The artists must see all things as if he were seeing them for the first time. All his life he must see as he did when he was a child.

Imitators are but a servile kind of cattle.

The human spirit lives on creativity and dies in conformity and routine.

Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality.

I think the enemy of creativity in the world today is that so much thinking is done for you.

The source of genius is imagination alone, the refinement of the senses that sees what others do not see, or sees them differently.

Normal means lack of imagination and creativity.

One of the reasons I love making movies is because it's an opportunity to share with the world a different way of being or a different way of living or seeing the world. If it's something you've already seen before, if I have too many reference points for it, then it's not exciting for me to make.

I think that if you just kind of try to throw together a sketch show, but you don't have any real vision for what you want to do with the sketch, I don't think your chances are very good. You know, "Let's just have a sketch show!" You have to do something different with it; you have to reinvent that form every so often.

Go ahead and make something for the elites. Not the elites of class or wealth, but the elites of curiosity, passion and taste. Every great thing ever created was created by and for this group.

Everyone who enjoys supposes that the tree was concerned with the fruit, but it was really concerned with the seed. -In this lies the difference between all those who create and those who enjoy.

He that seeks popularity in art closes the door on his own genius: as he must needs paint for other minds, and not for his own.