Mike Myers Quotes

To have the ability to withdraw into oneself and forget everything around one when one is creating - What, I think is the only requirement for being able to bring forth something beautiful. The whole thing is - a mystery.

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.

I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.

I think every writer's had the experience of having a really good idea, waiting to write it, and then once you write it, you're like, "Oh I kind of got past the sell by date on this." I'm not connected to the initial spark that was the idea. A lot of that's about staying open.

There’s never a wrong idea. You just keep throwing stuff out and inevitably there are elements of different things that inspire a character or environment.

For me, the beauty of the blank page, or empty screen,staring up at nine thirty after two cups of coffee and a deep breath remains unique. The blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know - apart from the more obvious sensual ones - is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols. Making an idea into an emotion.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

My struggle over the years has constantly been, it only takes 10 minutes, or an average shower, to come up with a mini-series or two, but it takes a year to draw them. So for me, it's been just trying to find a way to get all these ideas and all these incidents on paper.

I write all the time and I try to think of ideas all the time.

I'm always telling myself as I write that I'm not really writing a novel; I'm just going to fool around with a character or an idea.

I have a shoebox: for ideas, fragments, snatches of conversation I hear. I scrawl it down, throw the scraps in the box. Every time I start a new script I start picking through the pieces. Suddenly you get five pieces together and think: this is almost the first Act of a movie, if I flesh it out a bit.

I gotta pound the keys for the ideas to flow.

I find it inspiring and I always think when I'm working on something new, whether it's a new kind of character or a new kind of story or new kind of camera, it gets my creative wheels spinning.

I do more writing by myself than with anybody else. My best thing is sitting...around somewhere with a guitar, and having an idea. You never know where it'd come from. Songwriting is a God-given talent.

I think, in fact, there's a plus and a minus to knowing my prior work, Happiness and so forth. The plus is of course you can see how I play with the characters, the storylines, and the way things play off each other. And the minus is that it makes you a little bit more self-conscious, that you're not able to enter the movie as it exists and lives and breathes, because you're so busy making references, connections that you're not able to release yourself from and take the film on your own terms.

Art goes on in your head. If you said something interesting, that might be a title for a work of art and I'd write it down.

In the same way, I can wake up with a very positive idea of what I want to do for my collection, and be completely desperate at night regarding the same thing. And I do a lot of other things too: Writing for me is almost as important as drawing my collection.

People get inspired to write, paint, draw, sing, sculpt, dance in many different ways. And there are many types of art. But the one thing that they all have in common is that they are all a sort of magic. Sometimes the magic flows from one’s fingers, other times it is transferred to the person who experiences the result. Magic has always worked in mysterious ways.

I think loneliness comes with being creative, because you are obsessed with creation. And it is so satisfying that sometimes, I have noticed, I completely neglect my friends and my family, and they fall away.

"Where do you get your ideas?" That's the one question I'm genuinely sick of being asked, and also genuinely fascinated by. What fascinates me is not that people ask the question, but what kind of answer are they really looking for? Because if I tell them the truth, which is "I make them up," they seem very disappointed. They want to know about the trek I do once a year to the mountain.

Don't think about making art, just get it done.

"The Diagnosis" had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes. I would do something and let it sit for three months... just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn't quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.

I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen... that if painters did know what was going to happen they wouldn't bother to do it.

I think once everything is in place, once you've kind of wrapped your head around the story and the character, it's very liberating and you can start doing things like you would do.