Nicolas Winding Refn Quotes

There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.

I've had to play characters who I absolutely disagree with, as far as their politics, as far as their religion, and their stance on certain social issues, I completely disagree with them. But I have to go in and find who they are and get to their core, into their truth, and have absolute faith and believe in that, in order to portray it. So you have to walk in a lot of different shoes, in that you can't help but have your mind open as a result of that.

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree.

People would say to me, 'Who do you want to be as an artist?' And I would just look at them because I didn't know.

As an artist, you reflect the world around you. To do that, you must dive in, take risks, fall on your face, win, and sometimes lose a great deal.

Both Frankenstein and the Hulk are looked at as horrific, but they're just trying to find their way, like all of us.

Everything I do is really an expression of myself, through colors and shapes and, at the same time, I try to explain what I feel not only as a creator but also as a woman. I cannot separate one from the other.

A lot of writers don't know what it feels like to get on stage. They don't understand the weight that songs can carry. I got a chance to play all these shows. I got a chance to define myself through music, so when it comes to helping other people figure out what they should say, I've been through it.

I wanted to write songs about other people because I was sick of myself, basically. I didn't like myself very much. 'Ghostwriting' became an outlet for that. And then I could get back to get Jens Lekman again.

As an artist, you keep learning. You draw out different parts of you.

If I'm writing a song for Karen Harding, I know I can't impose what I want to say onto her. I literally have to get into her headspace and think, 'what does she want to say?' When it comes to my stuff, it's the same. What can I write that's true to me?

I feel more like an artist than a pop star, and I accidentally fell into what I do. Everything was just an experiment.

A way into a creative mind is to really step into their shoes. Do what they love most or try out their art.

The hardest part of being an artist is discovering what it is you do differently.

I've been adjusting to what it means to be a songwriter, figuring out what I like about it and what I don't like about it and what it means to me as opposed to other people.

I needed my own territory, and I didn't know how I was going to get it. And so I took my frustrations and plugged them into someone entirely different from me. I wanted to see if I could slip into someone else's skin.

My life and career is defined by the constant pursuit of new forms of culture and self-expression.

I've taken a look back at my body of work and tried to deduce an essence, capturing aspects that reoccur. Reflecting on your own product can be difficult yet enthralling.

We're all inspired by what has come before us, but hope to use the inspiration to create our own. That's the artist's journey. It's a pretty amazing path.

Your music essentially reflects everything you do, everything you've been through, in the deepest part of you.

...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.

I didn't dare to think of anything then except the "facts." To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one doesn't become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual. You have to be carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self. You have to get beyond pity in order to feel from the very roots of your being.

Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the artist's work.

It's very easy I think when you're a creative person to wait for the right thing and to start getting self-conscious about how you are going to express what you do and what's special about you. I would say in general, a lot of times the answer is that you just dive into something and you find your own voice through that process.

What obsesses a writer starting out on a lifetime's work is the panic-stricken search for a voice of his own.