George Saunders Quotes

Not to compare an actor to a painter, but you can go through different phases and still be the same artist, y'know?

I don't want real life necessarily to be seen only as a context to heighten the deepness my work.

One does not set out with the idea that I've just had a great idea and now I'm going to go and carry it out. Almost all art that's made like that doesn't go anywhere.

Each film I make changes me in some way. When I start the picture I'm one person and by the time I finish I'm another.

I can't just go into the studio with one idea and be all in on that, 100 percent. It takes me a while to arrive at something that feels like it's finished.

You just gotta record stuff and move on and make new material. Painters don't wait until they're in some specific gallery before they move on to the next painting.

At first you're doing it for yourself, it's about what sounds good to you. It's about expressing yourself. Then you get comfortable as an artist and you find yourself and people get familiar.

Sometimes for a lot of new artists, they don't have a vision, really, or know what they want to say; it's kind of drawn out for them. But me, because I'm such a transcendental thinker, it's always like a journey and an adventure with each project. It's like going through a different doorway each time.

I don't want to compare myself to Picasso, but he had four or five periods in his life. Any good artist grows and changes and matures.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

The idea of going on tour for the rest of my life with old works is not that exciting. As an artist I definitely think the work in future is going to be better than the work in the past, otherwise why do it?

I have 30 years of experience working with Leos Carax, so all the films of Leos Carax are unusual or unique. I look at them as a journey: a journey which is very personal to Leos.

The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can't give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

Sometimes I can see the whole painting from the outset in my mind's eye. But more often than not, that idea doesn't last the duration of the painting. Sometimes it comes out easy, just as I had envisaged. But that is reasonably rare.

I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That's why I keep making them.

Artwork is not like a commercial business; there is no such thing as a schedule for art. You can't hurry art.

It is important to make your own stuff. Even if you are not an actor, it is important to not stop involving yourself as a creative person.

You know creators, composers, need a palette for life, a color for life.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

The studio is a laboratory, not a factory. An exhibition is the result of your experiments, but the process is never-ending. So an exhibition is not a conclusion.

You don't make a movie, the movie makes you.

If you're a creative person, what inspires you is always changing; it's always shifting.

I don't start a piece knowing exactly what effect it's going to have. There is a seed of an idea that I could never articulate, right at the beginning of the piece, literally like one cell.