Stuart Immonen Quotes

Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.

For me, the most difficult piece is the one I'm about to make.

Two sittings a day of my models and I'm totally exhausted.

My process is messy and non-linear, full of false starts, fidgets, and errands that I suddenly need to run now; it is a battle to get something - anything - down on paper. I doodle in sketchbooks: bits of ideas, fragments of sentences, character names, single lines of dialogue with no context.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It's fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

I think that's just part of how it is with making art. Sometimes you're just flooded with ideas, and then other times you're questioning all the ideas you ever had before, and everything is just... lame.

Writing, for me, is very inspiration-dependent. And inspiration can be a jerk.

Sometimes, trying to make a work of art can be very difficult and very painful.

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

You start to compete with yourself when your catalog gets bigger and bigger... I mean, everybody wants the next 'Bless the Broken Road,' but you don't write those every day, so it's difficult.

I never know when a record is finished until it's almost finished.

It is no more easy to make a good picture than it is to find a diamond or a pearl. It means trouble and you risk your life for it.

I've found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience - both physical and mental - and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself focused on what I'm doing.

Generosity is a two-edged virtue for an artist - it nourishes his imagination but has a fatal effect on his routine.

The artistic impulse seems not to wish to produce finished work. It certainly deserts us half-way, after the idea is born; and if we go on, it is labor.

I've ended up as a filmmaker who really loves the movie part of movies. That time in my life was a big influence on the kind of movies that I ended up making. I always think I'm going to make a movie that's gritty and real, but then I make a movie that's like an opera. I fight it at first and then that's just the way it is.

Lots of artists who paint have the experience to one degree or another... where their thinking doesn't precede their doing... It's a funny thing, what I really hate yet I have to go through with it, is the preparation.

Painting seems like impossibility, with only a sign now and then of its own light.

Try drawing or painting a scene you're working on. Often this will help free up you imagination.

Then you learn about composition, you learn about old masters, you form certain ideas about structure. But the inhuman activity of trying to make some kind of jump or leap, where , the painting is always saying, 'What do you want from me? I can only be a painting.' You have to go from part to part, but you shouldn't see yourself go from part to part, that's the whole point.

That's what it feels like when I write, like I have this beautiful world in my head, but when I try to remember it in order to write it down, I change it, and I can't ever get it back.

I do love the challenge of screenplays. They're so difficult, such an alien form. It makes them endlessly fascinating. Something I can't keep my fingers out of.

I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.

writers just kept on staring at nothing until they wrote something. Might be two minutes or two weeks.

I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.