J. D. Salinger Quotes

I always wanted to be the underdog. For me, as a portrait photographer, it's the kiss of death to become well known. I did my best work when no one knew who I was. People weren't threatened by me because they didn't think I was a big deal.

I've been able to make films over the past 10 years but still maintain my anonymity.

I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.

As a painter, it seemed easier to sort of disappear.

As the writer of a pseudonymous book, I gave up my own accumulated history as a novelist and became what I had been as a child: unnamed, unidentified, unacknowledged. Invisible. In a very real sense, what I hope for in the process of imagining a book is to disappear.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

There's a creative freedom with being under the radar. But I guess if you're too under the radar, you get canceled?

The important thing is to make something. In reality, it's not important that a designer be known by name - you can remain anonymous. Even the status of a designer will undergo changes, I believe.

I've always really liked the idea of an artist name, like a cover-up, even though in my music I'm being very personal in the stuff that I write about.

People forgot about us, which was what we wanted. We could be left alone without any pressure to make music.

It's my belief that I was a writer - a very hardworking writer - well before I was published. I did care what others thought, and it was embarrassing when people asked me what I had published, so I didn't talk much about writing; rather, I just kept writing.

For the second series of 'Luxury Comedy', I tried to drop the 'Noel Fielding' from it. I thought that would make it less like a solo project and more like a show. Also, it would probably have been easier to take the reaction to the first series if it had been a project rather than my name and face!

When I started creating my work for publication, I just assumed that the focus would be on the work itself and that there wouldn't be a lot of interest in who was creating the work.

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.

The timing for directing is usually because it takes that long to develop a piece and then do pre-production and then post-production. It takes at least a couple of years. I prefer directing to doing other things. Directing and writing seem to be infinitely more creative

You spend so many months and years in the studio, and you see the clock ticking and so much time spent on the minutiae of technical things. And I just thought it'd be fun to do something extremely fast and get that rush of something that had some energy, something that you weren't tired of when you finished it.

Most of my books are a two-year project. I tend to follow my heart and my mind and research materials where they take me.

If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

I eventually want to come back to Canada, to disappear, have nobody know me, and just be a writer and do what I want to do.

I've tried never to be easily satisfied, and I've been painting like fury now for forty years.... I have a feeling. You paint about as far as your emotions go, and that's about it.

From the beginning [of the Lincoln in the Bardo], I actually had it in mind not to write a novel. I'd kind of gotten past that point where I felt bad for never having written a novel, even to where I felt really good about it, like I was a real purist.

I like that feeling of discombobulation that comes in creating an absurd world that doesn't make sense.

When I was thirteen or fourteen I bought a paintbox with oil paints from money slowly saved up. The feeling I had at the time - or better - the experience of color coming slowly out of the tube - is with me to this day.

Twenty-five years ago I couldn't walk down the street without being recognized. Now I can put a cap on, walk anywhere and no one pays me any attention. They don't ask me about my movies and they don't ask me about my salad dressing because they don't know who I am. Am I happy about this? You bet.

Those of us who make films try to make something that we're feeling and that we would like. Then we just hope an audience responds the same way. It's very important to have the electrical circuit made, but I don't have control over how people feel when they flip the switch. So the whole idea of marketing research and test screenings is just foreign to me.