Oliver Jackson-Cohen Quotes

I think that's one of the greatest gifts you get if you're successful at something like music or film or photography - any of the arts - you can sit there and think. It's so much fun to sit there and think and wonder about the world and the universe.

Making a movie really frees up the way you think.

Guillermo del Toro is able to invent his worlds. I would find the pressure of having to invent crippling.

I like the idea of experimenting with all sorts of themes and just feeling free creatively.

It's a privilege to always be able to create.

I do think that I never got tied down to any social scene. I was just into creating stuff.

Our internal artist is always our creative child.

I would advise puppeteering for any artist. It's a way to break down pretensions. It's a sculpture that can talk. It's a painting that can talk. And it's pure play. I think every artist needs to stay in touch with the idea of playing. The artist should always be playing, always. All art is performance.

I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can't afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.

We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.

Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?

I think creativity becomes really beautiful and magical when you allow it to do what it's needing you to do.

I think there's no question that there's a reason why small children make great art and why slightly bigger children don't. And it's because small children don't worry about what anybody else thinks and slightly bigger children start to worry about these things.

When I made my first film, I think the thing was probably helped me the most was that it was such an unusual thing to do in the early 50s for someone who actually go and make a film. People thought it was impossible. It really is terribly easy. All anybody needs is a camera, a tape recorder, and some imagination.

I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.

Sex and art are the same thing.

I dont want to be a point guard, or a two-guard, I want people to think of me as "creative", I just want to create on the court.

Making movie you just think, well, you know what you're gonna do, and you just when it comes down to the very specifics of it, you kind of have to rely on your mode of panic, and how well your imagination and creativity and all that works when you're in that moment. And you know, frankly, I never worried about that. I never worried that as we moved into the very specifics of it.

I think everybody should just turn off their TV machines and make up their own songs about whatever comes to mind-their couch, their friends their loaves of bread. Everybody's got their own songs. There should be so many songs out there that it all turns into one big sound and we can put the whole thing into a pickup truck and let it roll off the edge of the Grand Canyon.

Ideas are the old-age of art. Artists have to keep young; they must not think too much - thought is death, while art is life. Such was Emile's viewpoint.

That's the artist's job, really: continually setting yourself free, and giving yourself new options and new ways of thinking about things.

I don't carry notebooks and I don't consciously store ideas. I try not to think that I am a writer and I am pretty good at doing that. I don't like writers, but then I don't like insurance salesmen either.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.