Riz Ahmed Quotes

To me there's no creativity without boundaries. If you're gonna write a sonnet, it's 14 lines, so it's solving the problem within the container.

I think that limitations are the most important part of any art form

There are so many rules in the art world. I don't like rules and I break them all the time. I don't care if people think I'm overexposed. What I care about is if I'm going to run out of energy. Overexposure is only a problem if you are drained of energy and cannot come up with new ideas. Every artist has to recognize that and know when to stop for a moment.

There are many ways to go about a story. And if you give yourself some formal constraints, it just makes the job so much - maybe 'easier' isn't the right word, but because you know your boundaries, you can just play within those boundaries much more, so it's much more fun to do.

In order to understand what they need to understand, in order to write what they write, they have to be free. And yet, they aren't ever free. They are not free because they are not free of the constrictions their art puts on them.

I think every artist needs a rule that's stupid but that helps him, like a deadline would.

I'm a big believer in creating parameters for creativity. I think parameters make people more creative. So that starts with my budgets. I only do low budget movies, and I think that makes the movies better.

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and the rest of it.

You have to have a certain amount of limitations, I think, to make art and to make something that can be alive on film. Money can get in the way of that.

If you have total freedom to design, you won't get anything interesting. So I give myself restraints in order to kind of push myself through, to create something new. It's the torture that I give myself, the pain and the struggle that I go through.

Every artist has limits. No one can do everything. It's impossible.

It's harder to make something good when you can't curse all the time.

Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion.

In art, there is one thing which does not receive sufficient attention. The element which is left to the human will is not nearly so large as people think.

I work using the Brian Eno school of thinking: limit your tools, focus on one thing and just make it work… You become very inventive with the restrictions you give yourself.

We can't spend all day trying to get the performance exactly right and you just have to accept that and move on and accept the medium that you're working in and you know, there's a beauty in working under constraints and limitations. I think a lot of great things can come out of that.

If you have total freedom to design, you won't get anything interesting. So I give myself restraints in order to kind of push myself through, to create something new. It's the torture that I give myself, the pain and the struggle that I go through. So it's self-given, but that's the only way, I think, to make a strong, good new creation.

But I think I know just as many creative people who've never taken drugs in their life as I do who have taken a lot of drugs.

I'm trying to make something every time that feels new and surprises people. Hopefully at least one person. But it's not like I turn it off. I don't make a movie and then go back to my normal life. When I'm finishing one movie the next day I'm thinking about the next one.

Don't think. The worst songs I've ever written happen when I think.

I quite like being removed from the industry stuff so that when we're not on tour and we're writing, we're in a small room and you can't get out physically. I like that mental checking-out aspect - I think it's quite nice.

Art does not come from thinking but from responding.

I've had people appear in my life that have helped me. I had more fun. I approached it thinking how would Jack Nicholson, "How would he do it?" So that's really what I did was I created this Gremlin character. So now people come up and they say 'Oh The Exorcist!'.. and I'm like "Did you see Repossessed?" They say either no or yes or whatever, and I say look at this, have a laugh, and then go back and look at a masterpiece.

I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.