Edward Gorey Quotes

That's the great thing about filmmaking: Things happen you don't know are going to happen at the end.

The real artist's work is a surprise to himself.

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've never made a movie I wasn't surprised to see.

One of the main reasons that I love doing what I do is because it's unpredictable and I don't know what's coming next. When you're creating work, it's up to you whether it's an exciting experience or not.

I never know what I'm going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I'm just the middleman.

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

It's very important to understand that we never do the same thing twice; each of our projects is unique. We'll never do another 'Gates.' Each project is a unique image. We do not know in advance how the work will look. I do preparatory drawings, but they are only projections of our vision.

When you surprise yourself and you can't remember what the take felt like, then something transformative has happened.

A magic show and a concert are very similar in the way I like keeping things a mystery and not doing them the same way every time. The listener and the audience never know what's going to happen next.

I like to surprise myself. I like to surprise my fans, too.

If a piece of genius comes, it comes, and it if doesn't, it doesn't.

Yes it was chaos, working through chaos, you never quite knew what you were going to do each day, but you knew that you wanted to make something.

Art happens-no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.

If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens.

Of the truly creative no one is ever master; it must be left to go its own way.

When creative people do their best work, they're hardly ever in charge, they're just sort of rolling along with their eyes shut yelling wheee.

Artists of all disciplines must be willing to go into the dark, let go control, be surprised.

I love the joy in the improvisational creative process.

When we put the antlers on the model and then draped over it the lace embroidery that we had made, we had to poke them through a £2,000 piece of work. But then it worked because it looks like she's rammed the piece of lace with her antlers. There's always spontaneity. You've got to allow for that in my shows.

Art is like turning corners, one never knows what is around the corner until one has made the turn.

I like to surprise people. I try to take risks.

I'm a believer in just open, free-form creativity, and you never know the surprises that life has in store, and that, purely on a creative level, there's no such thing as rules.

I like to surprise myself. I've always been attracted to projects where I don't know how they're going to turn out.