Andrew Stanton Quotes

The little dissatisfaction which every artist feels at the completion of a work forms the germ of a new work.

When I was a young artist, and I would go look at other artists' career retrospectives, and I was often disappointed with the lack of story line... What was missing to me was the story of where the artist came from and how they got to where they were.

I don't want to compare myself to Picasso, but he had four or five periods in his life. Any good artist grows and changes and matures.

I have a lot of influences. I like to sit down with the cinematographer a month before, and we'll watch pieces of 20 or 30 movies. You're basically the sum of all the experiences you've ever had, and they're sort of shaken up in you and reproduced in the things you create, and that includes seeing movies.

That's what's great about the arts. Everything inspires you, and you get a chance to grow from watching other people and how they do their work.

All artists are people of growth. It's like food, you take the good and leave the rest.

I don't believe that a writer does something wonderful spontaneously. I believe it's the result of years of living, of study, reading, his very personality and temperament. At one particular moment, all these come together and the artist 'expresses' himself.

Certain things you learn through exposure. It's really the elements which make up any artist. You really learn by example. You learn by influence. And some people have a huge impact on you, and that's how you become the artist you are.

I can't imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn't pass through a time of geekiness.

For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.

Not to compare an actor to a painter, but you can go through different phases and still be the same artist, y'know?

Sometimes I'm more inspired by stuff that tells a story and less inspired by stuff that's not a natural extension of what I'm already doing.

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.

The whole 'Djesse' project is, like, the paramount example of something that has evolved alongside me creating it. It started as one album, and then I realized that I had too many ideas for just one album.

The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses. A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.

When you play the bars, you pay your dues. It does matter that you know those things [songs]. And the great thing for me, too, is that I draw on that stuff as influences. It's also stuff that you put in the tank that you pull from to make records.

It does take a long time and a lot of paint to become our own artist.

The grace to be a beginner is always the best prayer for an artist.

People often ask me how long it takes me to write a play, and I tell them 'all of my life.'

For better or worse I'm the writer I am today because of hearing those Dylan records. For better and most certainly not for worse, I'm the person I am today because of hearing Charles.

I'm sure my first nine years have had a powerful influence on the kind of books I write.

The thing about being an artist is that you evolve so quickly, you grow, you learn, you change, you find yourself hating work that you made months prior. That's the hard part about making an album, but every couple days I fall asleep listening to my album front to back and I lay there feeling so proud of what I did.

The observation of nature is part of an artist's life, it enlarges his form [and] knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by formula, and feeds inspiration.

It's weird, but if I decide to do an album, then the ideas start fitting themselves together. I consider myself a nice, slow burn. Plus, it's not a race. And I have a lot to share.

I have never painted a recent picture.