John Allison Quotes

What I do is I basically make records to please myself first and foremost, and so one of the most important things for me as a musician and a writer and a producer is to feel like there's always a sense of evolution and reinvention with each record.

Any change in my style depends on many things, but it's whatever fits the project. It's important to me to make style changes from time to time; it makes me feel alive as an artist. For instance, with 'Moonshine,' I'm doing all my own coloring. That's a new development!

Your first film is always your best film, in a way. There's something about your first film that you never ever get back to, but you should always try. It's that slight sense of not knowing what you're doing, because the technical skills you learn - especially if you have a film that works, that has some kind of success - are beguiling. The temptation is to use them again, and they're not necessarily good storytelling techniques.

Every artist has to grow, and has to challenge themselves with a new form of expression.

I feel like I introduce another level of my creative ability on every album.

Each member does whatever they want with the song and it totally changes it from whatever idea I hear around it. It turns it into a Sonic Youth song and completely away from it being a solo song.

I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.

One of the reasons why you like to do your own drawings is, your style changes over time. And there's something about that that keeps it fresh to the viewer.

Everything that an artist does is a risk. Some people want you to stay the same. If you want to evolve, they want to keep you in a certain place.

I always wanted to be an artist, writer and poet since I was seven, and one has to live long enough to evolve as an artist and do one's finest work.

The feeling of an evolution is a constant for every artist who is pursuing the search of refinement and enlargement of his/her own means of expression.

My early paintings weren't that good - I was very influenced by Francis Bacon. But there was a kind of intensity there. And however influenced they may have been by other people, even my earliest paintings were recognisably my own.

I think that if you've got 5 million people that enjoy drama and invest in characters, you must take the time to not worry about your job and getting sacked and just go for it and hit it again.

In each medium - popular music, literature, and visual art, respectively - the woman has broken form, shed a skin, with each phase of her career, whereas the man has returned to ever-deepening iterations of the sound or sentence or imagery with which he began.

When I made my first film, it was just an adventure. But after my first movie, I guess I got more of a feeling of what was happening around me.

As a filmmaker, one tends to want to evolve evermore towards a place of independence.

It's important that the actor doesn't feel like they're working in a vacuum. If the actor is told, 'Oh, it's a secret; just play it this way or that way,' it's a bit patronising. I think you have to bring the actor into your thinking and explain things.

There were certain things that I tried to do on 'Karamchand.' Initially, they were hated, but eventually everyone loved the characterization.

Television offered me the opportunity to do new things; I had written a lot of scripts other than scary movies. I had actually written some romantic comedies and stuff that I really wanted to try my hand at, and nobody would let me do that. Television allowed me to do anything I wanted.

We want to create content that our fans will like but at the same time stretches us creatively, with our own little touch.

I think every artist reaches a place where they want to transcend genre.

After I finished 'The Darkest Minds' series, I knew I wanted to take a risk and work on something completely different - lighter in tone, with a little bit more romance, and a completely different set of characters - that would also, um, finally justify my liberal arts degree.

Finally, I've reached a place where if I'm working with an artist, they allow me to just do whatever I feel. Growing up, it was like, 'We want another 'Peaches and Cream.' Then you realise... why would you want a 2001 Mercedes Benz when I'm making 2018 Benzes?

I think the best artists find ways to reinvent themselves. They find new ways to tell their stories, or they find new stories to tell.

People always ask us, 'When are you guys gonna do a movie? When are you gonna do a TV show?' And to me, that feels like such a step backwards from where are.