Charles Mingus Quotes

I prefer the band aspect of things. I feel comfortable. It feels good to look to my left and right and see three other people on stage with you that love music as much as you.

The best thing about my job is that I work with the best creative people in the business in their fields.

Contemporary art and manga - what is the same about them? Nothing, right? The manga industry has a lot of talented people, but contemporary art works on more of a solitary model. No one embarks on collaboration in contemporary art in order to make money. But in the manga world, everyone is invested in collaboration. The most important point is that the manga industry constantly encourages new creations and creators.

Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place.

It's entirely to do with personality, I think. There are good directors who talk a lot, bad directors who talk a lot, and good directors who don't say much and vice-versa. It just depends on whether people respond to that personality and whether people have a willingness to do something for them.

I personally think if you're given four months instead of four weeks on a play, with the people who want to work that way, the play will invariably be different and stronger, and much more fulfilling and richer on all counts. There's no doubt in my mind about it.

I get really restless if I'm not working. I generate or try to generate my own stuff. I'm constantly on the prowl for working with the people I love and respect.

You can get really far by putting your ideas out there and letting other people build on them.

I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.

An honest, open environment can bring out the best in people.

I like to think that the stuff I do is oftentimes collaborative, so to have other people in it felt natural.

Jazz musicians are the coolest people on the planet. Can I have some cool?

Steven Soderbergh really likes Irréversible, that's about all I can tell you. About the making, well, it was a very particular situation, because those people all know each other, and they're all big stars. I felt like the little French guy, really. And I was very flattered to be called on that, of course, but I felt like if I didn't find something to be a little original, different, particular in the movie, I would just disappear.

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.

Dancing is being trusted with other people's guts; choreographing is trusting other people with yours. When I choreograph I'm giving a dancer something to do and trusting the dancer to do it and build on it.

If you're having fun, if you're working with people you love working with, then the results are always going to be exciting.

Have different people in your fold. Have cross-disciplinary collaborations.

Working with (new collaborators) and letting people in to try new melodies and new lyrical ideas was very hard.

One of my philosophies as a director is to listen to other people's great ideas because they'll help make you better.

It's such a contentious thing to get people in a room and just say, "go!"

Innovation happens when people are given the freedom to ask questions and the resources and power to find the answers.

Nothing great can come of more than three people in a room.

But it is really, really fun to just change it up some and to absolutely be a very small spoke on a big wheel, and to just be a part of that and contribute to something that people can enjoy.

... coming to a place like Nashville, which is just music music music, it's always been such an influence on me. And there are so many interesting songwriters out there, and it's such a crazy business and so many people are trying to do it, and it's all right there in Nashville.

If you have written something that the film people want, like a book, it does give you a way in.