Richard Gere Quotes

The common, the quotidian, is so much more unyielding to me, really stubborn and hard to work with, and I like this because it makes me think and it makes me worry. I can't just plunge my hand into the meat of it. I need new approaches.

I would say any creative person has that: you can't just force a topic. Whether you're a painter, you want to do a cartoon. Anything. Something may come up that's not your style or suited to what you are working on at the moment. So you file it away and hopefully find a place for it.

For me, drawing generates thinking and vice versa.

When I was 5 and playing against 11-year-olds, who were bigger, stronger, faster, I just had to figure out a way to play with them.

I'm probably creative for half an hour a day. The rest of the time, I'm just doing what's necessary to make that creativity visible.

You think about the beauty and what you want to transmit. If I think about designing, I can't design.

What I love about the creative process, and this may sound naive, but it is this idea that one day there is no idea, and no solution, but the next day there is an idea. I find that incredibly exciting and conceptually actually remarkable.

Composing demands a degree of isolation.

I think a craft becomes an art form when the space of possible solutions becomes so huge that engineering can't carry you through.

A good artist has less time than ideas.

I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play-but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

You cannot just be working in a vast, air-conditioned loft space and think you are going to make a decent painting. Francis Bacon had a special studio built, and he felt completely emasculated in there. I have to be somewhere comfortable.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.

You write five different things, and none of them work, and then suddenly something does, and you ask yourself, 'Why did that last one work?' I think that's the way the artistic mind works. All writers and artists of all kinds often don't know why things work.

I always conceive a piece as a different set of challenges.

When I'm stuck for a closing to a lyric, I will drag out my last resort: overwhelming illogic.

When I'm writing, I'm just in it and trying to figure out what seems best.

Most artists have experienced the creative block. We get stuck in our work. We beat our head against the wall: nothing. Sometimes, it is because we are trying something at the wrong time.

The best way to investigate the elusive phenomenon called the creative process may well be to target all the misconceptions, to explain what the creative process is not.

The audience may not have felt it was right, and the author may have felt a little upset, but every part I've played I've twisted around in my mind until I've made it into something of my own. Looking back over it, I didn't deliberately sit down and plan like that, but it does read like it.

If you can't get your songs to people one way, you have to find another.

I'm a believer that you shouldn't really talk about the drawing until you're done with the drawing.

I played Othello, but I didn't sit around thinking how Laurence Olivier did it when he played it. That wouldn't do me any good.