Larry Wall Quotes

I don't really enjoy working in TV, to be completely honest, even though it's incredibly lucrative, I'm just terrified of not being satiated in a myriad of different ways. It's amazing that I get to create every day, as an actor, or a director, or a writer, and I get to do it in a variety of different genres and worlds and characterizations. I think that's the great privilege of what we do, we get to make believe. I get to go to so many different places, try on different occupations, take on different points of view. That's what's always been sort of alluring.

What you don't want is to repeat a formula over and over or impose a formula to a movie that...when you impose yourself and you impose a formula and you're not open to explore and to find what is right for the movie, I think you're doing a disservice to the story and what you're trying to express.

I think it's bad for human beings to be artists. It's awful. You want to do something but you're constantly trying to decide what you want to do. Let's just say it's no place like Hawaii.

If you just write the kinds of stories you think others will want to read, you'll be competing with cartoonists who are far more enthusiastic for that kind of comic than you are, and they'll kick your ass every time.

If you have several ideas that all seem pretty good, work on the one that you think about, when you're not trying to think about work.

I don't like having hierarchical structures. So, everybody knows that I'm the boss but, from that, I don't like people to walk on eggshells. I like people to be friendly and to feel loved. I think that kind of fits into creativity stronger. If people are scared, they are afraid to come up with ideas.

People think the Beatles know what's going on. We don't. We're just doing it.

I think I'll try to keep working in film for a little bit. There's something still kind of magical about it, that I don't want to let go of.

I truly think that you can't go and stalk your material, you have to leave the door open and whatever chooses you, chooses you. You can't go and wrestle it to the ground.

if you think it so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.

Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.

As for me, the only stuff I've ever had success with is when I'm trying to be completely original and not thinking about mirroring what else is out there.

I don't think about commercial concerns when I first come up with something. When I sit down at the piano, I try to come up with something that moves me.

I am not one of the new media experts working all the time with my computers and the PowerPoint's and things of that sort. So, I'm an old fashioned still in this regard but these are the moment where I really can be creative, if I am, to be left alone with just a book and piece of paper and to be thinking.

I try not to think too much or be too impatient, and let the back of my brain do its mysterious work.

I want to tell stories, I don't really try to get boxed in by a specific genre.

I don't like to hear anybody in show business complain, because I just find it to be such a grateful business. Because there are so many wonderful, creative souls out there and there are so few jobs. And, so, I just find myself thinking to myself "wow, if I could get into a show of any kind and have it last for a while" - that's when I find myself really happy.

My husband says I have too much imagination, but I don't think a writer can have too much imagination!

Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.

If you think someone's trying too hard, that's the worst thing they can do. To me, it's just desperate, never funny and never witty. It's kind of really old hat because just being shocking isn't enough. It has to change how you think about something. It has to startle you. It has to make you look at something and reconsider whether you're right. That's the whole point.

I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important.

I think it's more interesting if you go all the way with the world you have, and really look at it, and push it to an even more extreme extreme.

It's impossible for me to feel like there's only one way to do a thing. There's nothing wrong with having one way of doing it, but I think it's a bad habit. I believe in range. Like, there's a lot of tunes that I play all the time-sometimes I hear 'em in a different register. And if you don't have complete freedom, or you won't let yourself get away from that one straight line, oh, my goodness, that's too horrible to even think about.

Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else ... may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds.

It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive.