Kevin Costner Quotes

I like to make films because I like to go into another world. I like to get lost in another world. And film to me is a magical medium that makes you dream... allows you to dream in the dark. It's just a fantastic thing, to get lost inside the world of film.

In my everyday life, I can be as square as I want. But when it comes to movies and telling stories, I can't. I've got to be radical, and on some level, that's what I like to do.

Poets and painters are outside the class system, or rather they constitute a special class of their own, like the circus people and the Gypsies.

writers who go outside the lines when they draw pictures of the world are seldom rewarded for their efforts.

A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.

There is no model, there is only color.

But writers INVITE ghosts, maybe; along with actors and artists, they are the only totally accepted mediums of our society. They make worlds that never were, populate them with people who never existed, and then invite us to join them in their fantasies. And we do it, don't we? Yes. We PAY to do it.

I never really followed the traditional route when it comes to what people probably expect as a solo artist goes, but that's just me. It's my own creative output and it's my expression.

I feel that America is essentially against the artist, that the enemy of America is the artist, because he stands for individuality and creativeness, and that's un-American somehow.

True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.

The art of not playing in tempo--one has to learn it. And the art of not playing what is written on the printed paper.

I'll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette.

The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.

I loved the idea of the fact that the way, like I said, they colored outside of the lines. You know, there was rules that they didn't have to follow. And you got -you got - you could get more of a sensational thrill, all right, with some of these exploitation movies or art films, or you could get something you wouldn't see at the normal cineplex.

I became an artist because of the possibility it gave me to develop in another way, because I didn't want to follow the same lines the others around me did. I was educated in the former German Democratic Republic, which meant that an individual figure had to be... like a soldier in the army.

Art isn't about following the rules. It's about breaking them.

I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.

One of the wonderful things about making a film of any genre is that you have dialogue. You can take up a position. If you want to say something about your position, you can just say it. You don't have to spend massive amounts of screen time.

What is it about conformity itself that causes us all to require it of our neighbors and of our artists and then, with consummate fickleness, to forget those who fall into line and eternally celebrate those who do not?

Wasn't the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn't have to wear a tie?

I prefer writing for myself to perform, I guess. But if I had to choose, I'd rather perform in someone's movie than write a movie for someone else.

There probably is a lot of music that no one's ever gonna hear. For anyone doing music, just do exactly what it is that makes you want to do it. If you like listening to odd, strange, bizarre noise and that makes you want to create it, do it. Even if everyone around you tells you it's crap or thinks it won't work, someone out there is going to appreciate it.

I feel like my music stands for the ultimate statement of irreverence.

I think my home is in that sort of the part of cinema that's disappeared is where I lived, that sort of mid-budget you know, drama. I suppose that's what I am known for.

We didn't think about it but we never wanted to sound like anybody else.