Frederick Wiseman Quotes

We actors are superstitious creatures. We do all the homework, and we put all of the components together, but there's always one key aspect that we're not in charge of, really, and that's magic. You are always on the lookout for where and how that magic is going to ignite.

Every time I write a song I feel really lucky and kind of surprised. Not surprised that I wrote it, but just surprised that things exist that you don't know about.

All good ideas arrive by chance.

You can find inspiration when you're not even looking for it.

I would like the work to be non-work. This means that it would find its way beyond my preconceptions...It is the unknown quantity from which and where I want to go. As a thing, an object, it accedes to its non-logical self. It is something, it is nothing.

Do as many ideas as possible. The right idea will pick you.

You write a book and it's like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it in the ocean. You don't know if it will ever reach any shores. And there, you see, sometimes it falls in the hands of the right person.

How many times it thundered before Franklin took the hint! How many apples fell on Newton's head before he took the hint! Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over again. And suddenly we take the hint.

Winston, I don't know what I want, but I want you to go out and get it. When I see it, I'll know if it's what I thought I wanted. (Quoting a photography client.)

I don't expect to find inspiration. It just sort of comes. Sometimes you step on a bug and you get inspired.

I consider projects very deeply, but there's always a point in your life where there's a bit of randomity.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

Every song I've written is luck, I think; it's luck - 'How did that just happen?'

Books are magic: you never know where they're going to end up.

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

Happy accidents are real gifts, and they can open the door to a future that didn't even exist. It's kind of nice sometimes to set up something to encourage or allow happy accidents to happen.

You never know when your ideas are going to come back to you.

My work is on the one hand laboured, and on the other completely happenstance and intuitive.

I don't know - it's a bit of a mystery of how things come about when they do. I don't have a scientific explanation for it. Sometimes when you're writing a song, you don't know where you're going.

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

Fear of the unknown is a great creative partner.

Certain things you have to stumble on to. They can't be preprogrammed.

When I put my brush to canvas, I never know what I'm going to paint. It's like when you're walking down the street with your hands in your pockets, humming a tune, you don't know what you'll be humming five minutes from now.

I think I get credit for my timing because most of the time, I really have no idea where I'm going with it.

In using chance operations, the mind is enriched.