Colson Whitehead Quotes

There has to be an entry point to learn about myself, or an idea I've never tried, because then I can try on a new skin and see the world through a different perspective. If I have that spark, then I'll save the file.

I've produced and gotten to do a lot of optimistic love stories, and that was so where I was at for 10 years in my life. And now I feel like, Okay, now I know how to do that. I want to get scared again; I want to feel the way I felt when I started my company, when I started producing.

As an actor, that's what you want. You want variety. I want to try things that I'm not used to and push my own envelope and see what I'm capable of.

When I paint, I never think of selling. People simply fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights.

You always want to challenge yourself and work with people you respect. You can't always go by genres, but it's always fun to challenge yourself.

Be authentic to your dreams. Be authentic to your own idea about yourself. Grind away at your own minds and bodies until you become your own invention. Be Mad Scientists.

I come from an art-school background, and I still feel that in my music, it's about exploration and challenging myself, about putting myself in a place that's frightening because I haven't been there before.

I think that as an artist, the more that you can do to diversify, and kind of challenge yourself, the more you grow.

The stage sharpened my creative instrument and encouraged me to go deeper and try new things.

You are constantly looking for ways to do something you haven't done before, whether it's a particular role or doing theatre. As a person, I'm really open to experience.

I spent 12 years doing different things in film trying to figure out the story I wanted to tell.

Well to be perfectly frank with you I never created art or have done demonstrations for anyone before myself artistically. I always do it to try to push my own envelope to be the best I can be.

As an artist, I think it's important to always keep growing, and I definitely want to keep challenging myself.

Working on my own gave me a chance to take my time and experiment a lot.

Growing up, nobody I knew even knew a writer. So it was a big adventure and something that I've wrestled with my whole life. I think it's a journey worth taking, really finding out who you are and what you do well.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

You're always in a different headspace when you make each record, so hopefully they're all different. You just pick up things that you wish you hadn't done on the first one.

With 'Letters from Iwo Jima,' then 'Memories of Tomorrow,' I reached a sort of turning point in my acting. I had poured so much of myself into those movies that I really had no idea where to go from there.

Of course you draw from yourself, but the artistic nourishment you want to get is be versatile, do something different, and I think I got a chance to do that in a lot of different ways.

I had opportunities to stay on shows for long periods of time, and maybe financially that would have been good, but I feel good about trying to keep doing things that are a little bit different than what I've done.

The part of the process that's exciting to me is feeling like I'm in a place I've never been before, in every way. Without that, I don't know if I'd be a writer.

I try new techniques and styles almost every day, so I'm always challenging myself.

I try every day to do something that I've never done before or make some sound that I've never made before.

The only intention I've ever had creatively, as a musician, is to be as different from myself as possible.

I don't want to limit myself as an actor alone.