Octavia Spencer Quotes

I know it sounds really precious and pretentious, but I can't actually remember deciding to want to be an actor. I just knew that I had too many feelings and I had to kind of get them out in some way.

I understand wanting to do your craft. I understand wanting to have a passion for your art and for your ability to be an actor, to be a singer, to be a dancer - that I understand. Wanting to be famous - I don't get that. But that's where we're living right now.

It is not the act of making art that is painful. It is the desire to make something and not acting on it that causes pain....A day when I don't write is less happy. This is not discipline. It is affection, enthusiasm, adventure-any number of other words besides discipline.

Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.

There are many days when I want to throw my computer out the window, when I tell myself I'd be better off selling shoes at the mall. But I always keep at it, because I have to. Writing is completely part of who I am. Even if I never published another book, I would keep at it - because it feeds my life and makes it richer.

I've been writing my entire life, and I'll always write.

There were a million different things I could have chosen or wanted to do, but the path of an artist was the one that pulled me the most. I did local theater and plays in school. I think there was a sense of entertaining - being on the stage, making people laugh, making people cry - that I was drawn to. It was also one of those things like, "I can do this for a very long time."

No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.

Artists usually don't make all that much money, and they often keep their artistic hobby despite the money rather than due to it.

True artists are almost the only men who do their work for pleasure.

Whatever it is that I thirst for in my current project tends to turn up in my following project.

The reason you do this stuff - comedy, plays, movies - is to be seized by something, to disappear in the service of an idea.

I wouldn't know any other way to live except to be an artist. I'm not very good at anything else.

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It's the same with me and writing.

I only get involved with projects as a producer if I feel creatively inspired.

I would like to continue making music and acting in projects that give me a lot of satisfaction.

I always wanted to write fiction. Always. As far back as I can remember it's been integral to my sense of myself - everything else was always a displacement activity.

No one can be a painter unless he cares for painting above all else.

I'm expressing myself by acting. I'm learning about myself and making a living. I hope to do much more of it, so I can contribute my share to the world.

I'm not a politician; I'm lucky to be a filmmaker and to be able to express myself through the films I make.

For me to want to be an actor was an improbable idea. I wasn't beautiful or pretty in any conventional way. I wasn't an ingenue at 22. But I was always certain of it and certain of its power. I felt the power when I went to the theater at 9, 10, 12 and 14.

The real artist has no idea that he is sacrificing himself for art. He does what he does for one reason and one reason only-he can't help doing it.

I will keep painting until I die.

There are two kinds of artists in this world; those that work because the spirit is in them, and they cannot be silent if they would, and those that speak from a conscientious desire to make apparent to others the beauty that has awakened their own admiration.

I learn a lot from acting, but it's not my natural way. I can't help but write; I do it all the time. It's a condition of being for me.