Ben Affleck Quotes

When creative people do their best work, they're hardly ever in charge, they're just sort of rolling along with their eyes shut yelling wheee.

I love the joy in the improvisational creative process.

There is no end in creativity. Hence, to strive towards an end result is a fool's errand. Set goals, make music and paint pictures, but know that the crux of your happiness balances delicately on the wings of the act of creativity itself. Not at the finish line.

When I sit down to make music, I try to enter a flow; I always open a blank session and just make something that I feel like making.

People go, 'What do you want to do?' What do you want to do? What are you feeling? Going into a shoot not fully knowing what I want to do—that excitement, that thing that happens, is just so powerful and makes such great pictures.

Painting is similar to music. You get a couple or words or notes or chords that excite you, and you just follow them and add a bit more and see where it takes you. That's the thrill for me. It still is a thrill, which is amazing after all this time.

I get a sentence, an idea, an image, and I start. I don't know anything beyond it. I follow it.

I've always been somebody who, when I started a picture, never knew what the next picture would be.

Artwork is not like a commercial business; there is no such thing as a schedule for art. You can't hurry art.

Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can't be taught.

I used to look at composing music as problem solving. But as I get older, it's not about problem solving anymore. There are no solutions, because there are no problems. You just turn the tap and it flows out.

I never know what I'm going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I'm just the middleman.

I enjoyed art in school. I've always done little drawings and stuff like that. I don't really know what I'm doing with the painting, but I experiment.

I love the idea of leaving some of the original abstract thought in, because the problem is that when you pick up a pen you become a snob, your own worse critic. You edit yourself in a way that is non-creative.

I never have a plan of what I am going to draw.

I come in. I'm going to sketch, I'm going to drape, I don't know what I'm going to do.

The artist discards all theories, both his own and those of others. He forgets everything when he is in front of his canvas.

Being creative is my idea of heaven. I'm just incredibly fortunate that I can do it in artwork. Watercolor is what I started out with. What I love about watercolor is that a lot of happy accidents occur.

The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.

I never question what to do, it tells me what to do. The photographs make themselves with my help.

Artists today think of everything they do as a work of art. It is important to forget about what you are doing - then a work of art may happen.

Music is supposed to be inspired.

I've never been one of those guys who storyboards every frame, because that would take away some of the mystery and some of the fun.

It's not that I sit down and write great stuff without thinking, not at all. Most of it is terrible. But the stuff that feels fun and fresh to me tends to happen fairly unthinkingly.

It's so important to work with material you can really mold and milk and create and evolve.