Marlo Thomas Quotes

I feel as if I've been so inured to failure, because I fail more than I succeed. As with any kind of fiction, I throw out so many pages; I get rejected so many times.

The life of an artist is not all glamorous. It's a lot of work. A lot of people think that it's very easy.

All lives have triumphs and tragedies, laughter and tears, and mine has been no different.

I have a vast 'bone pile' of stillborn or abandoned poems along with jottings and wisps from the great beyond that I tend to scan. Sometimes that leads somewhere, and sometimes the Muse is just on sabbatical.

We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

I think either you're creative or you're not. In general, I don't think you need to be in pain to actually be creative unless you're writing love songs. Then you might need to have some ups and downs within your emotions to start to capture that.

My process is messy and non-linear, full of false starts, fidgets, and errands that I suddenly need to run now; it is a battle to get something - anything - down on paper. I doodle in sketchbooks: bits of ideas, fragments of sentences, character names, single lines of dialogue with no context.

That's human nature - the ups and downs.

There are dozens of unfinished or aborted projects in my files, but I can only assume they don't get done because they're not robust enough to struggle through the birth process.

People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.

Even though I hate acting, I love doing videos for my songs.

The hardest part of writing is the first draft, and the closer you get to your deadline, the messier your workspace becomes - but that's the same with any creative outlet.

I enter my studio at 9 a.m. I have lunch here, I return right away to my work and I go out to dinner at 8 p.m. My daily tasks vary very much.

I make paintings, try to get others to look at them and hopefully buy them.

One day I think it's the greatest idea ever that I'm working on. The next day I think it's the worst that I've ever worked on - and I swing between that a lot. Some days I'm very happy with what I'm doing, and the next day I am desperate - it's not working out!

And when you see it the first time you put the film together, the roughest cut, is when you want to go home and open up your veins and get in a warm tub and just go away. And then it gradually, maybe, works its way back, somewhere toward that spot you were at before.

Basically, I wake up at nine o'clock in the morning, go to different record stores, go to the studio, think up different ideas for songs. Just workin'.

Any journey of a creative person has, you know, really unusual challenges and years where you don't work and years where you work.

It's a weird thing about our business: You give everything you have, and there are moments where you go back and forth in your mind about if what you're doing is brilliant or a total disaster.

There are so many high-highs and there are so many low-lows in this game.

I still remember how hard I worked on the tune of 'Raree rareeram... ;' the first tune I tried was rejected.

I faced many ups and downs, like any other actor: not getting through auditions or even worse - getting shortlisted and not being selected. Most actors go through the process.

Sometimes I fall out of love with what I'm doing, but only for about a week. Once it's over I'm back to thinking it's the best job in the world again. But every job has it's ups and downs.

Some days I feel good about my work, and sometimes I feel I've never written anything worthwhile. That's par for the course.

If I'm not on tour or doing a show, I'm in the studio.