Francois Truffaut Quotes

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

I never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.

The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control - to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children's cartoons or utopian novels. But it's just a fantasy.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

The most interesting things that happen in my books are usually the things that arise spontaneously, the things that surprise me.

In general, I don't know when inspiration will pop up.

I quite like the element of surprise, and as much as I have my ideas, I always appreciate ideas that come from other people as well, and I love the mystery of not knowing.

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

I'm a believer in just open, free-form creativity, and you never know the surprises that life has in store, and that, purely on a creative level, there's no such thing as rules.

I've never been one of those guys who storyboards every frame, because that would take away some of the mystery and some of the fun.

If you create a place where anything can happen, anything will happen.

Art happens-no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.

I'm never quite sure how the poem is going to resolve itself and that I'm always in some way surprised. I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know.

Creativity is a continual surprise.

If the unusual never happened there would be no difference in people and then there wouldn't be any fun in life. The game would become merely a matter of addition and subtraction. It would make of us a race of bookkeepers with plodding minds. It's the guessing that develops a man's brain power.

There's no game plan when it comes to thinking up new characters; inspiration can come from anything - from a wig I've seen to an expression I've heard someone use.

One of the things that I find so exciting about life is that you're constantly surprised. You never know what's going to happen, and it's certainly like that making movies; every once in a while, one will come along that transcends all of your expectations.

I've always been somebody who, when I started a picture, never knew what the next picture would be.

Magic lies in challenging what seems impossible.

You don't know what inspires you. You like to think you know what inspires you, but in the final analysis I don't think you really do. It's great to look at a blank sheet of paper, you know, and walk up to an instrument and not know what's gonna happen. It's the most challenging thing I do.

If I knew where I was going, I wouldn't do it. When I can predict or plan it, I don't do it.

From the moment you say 'action,' this is the fun part - things should happen that surprise you, excite you, scare you, turn you on, make you laugh. If things aren't surprising you, when you say 'cut,' whisper things to the actors that will make them do things that do surprise you.

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.

It's great meeting children because you never know what they will say.