David Lowery Quotes

I started out doing music videos and photography, and I always loved writing. Filmmaking seemed to be a good compilation of all these skills in a way that allowed me to tell a story 'greater than the sum of its parts.'

I write a chapter, then edit it and edit it and edit it and edit it. I don't think we mine creativity from within. It's bestowed from on high, from God.

Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.

My understanding of the creative process is simply that all cultures and all concerns meet at a certain point, the human point in which everything is related to one another. That has been my creative experience. I never know who's influencing me at any time.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.

A kind of synthesis, but with some elements that perhaps you wouldn't have expected in advance. I always like that when that happens, when something comes that is more than the sum of the parts.

I have notebooks and sketchbooks for ideas. I also have drawers full of envelopes covered in quick outlines, scenes or scraps of dialogue that I don't want to forget. I tend to grab whatever's to hand and just get the thing down before it's lost. It's not what you would call a streamlined system.

I write everything I do. On the average, it takes you about sixty months from the first molecule of an idea to it being in front of an audience. I'm actually somebody that creates their own stuff.

In the morning, Capra would arrive with twenty-or-so pages in which he'd written down all of his ideas. Most were terrible, then all of a sudden there would be one which was astounding.

I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.

I think artists should really write more.

I write songs every day, but only a few of them get finished.

For me, writing is a part of directing. It's the first stage of directing.

I teach songwriting a lot, and I always tell my students, 'You gotta write the little songs sometimes to get to the next big song in the chute.' You gotta write 'em to get to it. You never know what's going to be a little song or a big song.

That's the great part about arts - someone taking your work and making it something else; it's becomes a true collaboration.

It's pretty funny to me when I hear people say, 'I write six songs every day,' or, 'I turn out a song a day.' I bet you that's a whole week of bad songs.

There's an attitude that I have where I bring the art to the table and the writer brings the writing to the table, but neither of us brings the story to the table. The story is something that only happens with the combination of both of us.

I'm really interested in the form, putting one piece up against another and finding something corroborative in another voice. I've done a lot of that.

It's just the garbage in/garbage out trick. If you're not taking any fiction in, good or bad, then how can you be spitting any back out (good or bad)? I can't even imagine trying to write without reading. Really, I can hardly write a novel at all if I'm not reading just book after book.

Sometimes the entire thing comes out in one burst. Sometimes you hack away at a thing for years before you get something that satisfies you.

I tend to write first thing, and then do my drawing later. I like to draw at night. But often I go for long stretches without drawing, because I'm trying to figure out what I'm writing.

You probably have to trust that your work is following certain themes and certain movements, but then the rest is a kind of piecing together so that the whole becomes larger than the parts.

I've described my usual writing process as scrambling from peak to peak on inspiration through foggy valleys of despised logic. Inspiration is better when you can get it.