Peter Billingsley Quotes

My ultimate search has been for a muse.

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

I've just always loved really good projects. The things that draw me into a new project have very little to do with genre and have more to do with the characters I'll be playing, the people I'll get to work with and things like that.

I don't think there will ever be a time I don't write, and I hope there will never be a time I don't act.

I don't really have a preferred genre. It's more up to the individual project itself and if I feel compelled by it.

I have that love for music, when you are finding either old gems that you never heard or newer stuff that perks your ear. It keeps you trying to look for new stuff to write about it. You don't spin your wheels. I take that same approach to music and books.

Every good picture leaves the painter eager to start again, unsatisfied, inspired by the rich mine in which he is working, hoping for more energy, more vitality, more time - condemned to painting for life.

To work with a director that has emotional commitment and passion toward the characters, and the piece, and the experiences, it only enriches your work.

You can never tell when an artist really will take up someone's work and work with it happily.

I want to die painting.

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.

Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.

I look at composers and conductors, anybody involved in music or writing or art in general; they got more done as they got older. If I can, I'll be one of those people because what I do is my passion.

The only reason why you should do a film is because it creatively carbonates you and gets you going. If you're doing it for any other reason, you've lost sight of why you're acting in the first place.

I don't care what I do - act, stand-up, write, direct - it doesn't matter as long as I'm being creative and it's good work.

The reason I don't make more movies is because it's really hard to find ideas that I go, 'Yeah, I could spend two years of my life doing this.' Mostly what I do is say no to movies because I go, 'Maybe I would see that, but I don't think I could spend two years on it. I'd go nuts.'

I don't see how it's a risky thing to take a great part with a great director and a great script. That, to me, is not really a dangerous, risky proposition. It's actually a really good choice.

What inspires me is not so much the music as the opportunity to interact with composers. I think that has driven everything I've done.

The basic challenge of any book is you know you're going to be working on it for three or four years or more. So you want to have a subject that will keep you engaged.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

My very first movie, 'Mary Poppins,' which I talk about, it just turned me into an obsessive, creative creature who had to sort of reply to the experience by drawing things, making things. It was like it forced - it made me into this obsessive, creative creature... I don't know any other way of putting it.

It's very lucky when you have an artist - whether it's a novelist or a filmmaker or a singer - whose career you can follow from the beginning and feel that you are in some way part of it, or part of the same world that it comes out of.

I collect art like other people eat pizza. I can't get enough of it. I need a constant source of inspiration.

Whenever I've done jobs, whether it's an acting job or writing job, there's an aspect of it that feels like you help build your piece of it, and then you watch as someone takes it, and they finish building it.

The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something one really does not need to make anything --and one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the ''productive'' man a yet higher species.