Sydney Pollack Quotes

I need some kind of emotional stake in it to write my lyrics, assuming that place. It might just be an emotion I understand but am not currently experiencing necessarily.

When I'm watching one of my movies in a festival with fans who are just into it and they love it? I end up feeling like my film is more interesting, it becomes more fun to watch and I get a special energy that feeds back into my process.

Everything I do, it's a bit painterly. I like being surrounded by objects, mostly on paper. I like the images. I like the painting. I like good photography. It's something that makes me an emotional connection, and I feel comfortable around it.

Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

Human requirements are the inspiration for art.

Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.

Some people can sit and enjoy the view... some people like to take photos to feel complete. I need to somehow possess it in some other way. I just have to somehow grasp it and take it home in a more fulsome way. It's where ideas come from.

To paint well, I need to be enraptured by my subjects.

My only worry is the painting I'm doing. Nothing else.

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.

When I say art influences me, which it does, it's not at all in a literal form. You go and see exhibitions or collections or meet an artist. It's all a compilation. Every moment, at all times, all this information. Then all this information disappears, and it shows up later in the process.

Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.

I'm not very prolific. I'm not good at sitting down as an artist and saying 'Okay, I need to put in my four hours today.'

Egon Schiele is my favorite painter. There's just something about art - photography, painting, music, plays - whatever you see, sometimes there's a gut reaction that's more important or more visceral than what your brain is thinking about. You can't explain that reaction. It's like what happens when you fall in love.

I'd never painted anything before. I was quite content to take other people's work since I didn't care anyway about the subject matter. I approached subject matter as a scoundrel. I had nothing to say about it whatsoever. I only wanted to make these exciting paintings.

The artist is inherently a romantic to some degree, and as such, I believe in a muse. But I don't try to analyze too much where it comes from.

I love to zoom in and study why a chord is making me feel a certain way, but then I've learnt to zoom out again. Because if I'm not actually feeling it, there's not much point making it in the first place.

The thing that makes me want to proceed and finish a song is when it really touches me and makes me feel something.

That impulse I think is a form of love. Poetry is something that comes to you, rather than your having to work out its form beforehand.

Ask creative people where they get their ideas, and they will roll their eyes. It's the most common question, but it's also a bad one because the answer is inevitably disappointing. From the inside, creativity seems like an arduous task, often involving plebeian, imperfect choices, driven less by inspiration than by deadline.

At lucky moments this emanation could overwhelm the spectator in such a way, that because of all sorts of associations in his thinking, he could finally be taken to those areas which also had moved me so deeply and made me think I should draw the attention of others to it.

In the same way, I can wake up with a very positive idea of what I want to do for my collection, and be completely desperate at night regarding the same thing. And I do a lot of other things too: Writing for me is almost as important as drawing my collection.

I could never before say that I loved color or that I understood color. But Oscar de la Renta opened up a side of my brain.

Every time I get a script it's a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It's like falling in love. You can't give a reason why.

I find that I end up liking songs if I really have an idea of something I wat to write about-some problem in my life or something I want to work through; if I don't have something like that at the root of the song, then I think I end up not caring about it as much. I gravitate towards some kind of concept or idea or situation that I want to write about. Very often I have to write, rewrite and come at it from an opposite angle...and I end up writing the opposite song that I thought I was going to write.