Anthony Marra Quotes

For me, drawing is a way of navigating the imagination, and it remains the fundamental vehicle of my practice. Drawing allows me to be at my most inventive.

It's good to wander into the studio and walk out with something that's better than you'd imagined it to be. If everything was as you imagined it to be, it just wouldn't be as much fun.

What makes a book unique isn't always about having one big grand new idea. It's about combining many different ideas in new and interesting ways.

Part of the fun is finding out how elastic that box is and, you know, test the limits of what TV shows can do or what a music video can do.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

I hope what I do has an art to it, and as an artist you have to try new things and keep yourself entertained.

It's much more interesting for me to think that taking a chunk of experience and mushing it up together with other things that are inventible, remembered from some other time or stolen from other people's stories... and see if I can make it into something that works, an object, a little machine that runs.

The artist must continue to look for a new reference. Every day, every performance, every take.

Some of the screen's best moments were realized because a director went against all reason, all logic. No matter how incredible a story seems, it can be made credible. If you feel an insane idea strongly enough, you've usually got something.

Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.

For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.

We have the script, we have the actors, and we're trying to figure out what this is, and you don't know what it is. You have to be open to what it's going to become rather than have this thing that you're trying to get to, which is boring.

The camera has always been a magic wand for me, giving me access to places where I could try new experiments.

Design is the courage and brilliance to cover an original and make it different.

The merging of science and art is at the core of what we do.

I keep drawing inspiration from people every day. All of a sudden, something strikes me so hard and dramatically, and then a dream comes - I sit down, cut it off and make a script out of it.

The stage is like a laboratory where you can run theatrical experiments, imposing interesting conditions on the cast or story and seeing how they pan out. Each new play is like creating a tiny virtual universe enclosed by the confines of the stage.

I try stuff. I synthesize what's of value with some of the other things I have at my disposal.

I like coming up with new characters. Whether it's revamping an old character no one likes or just coming up with brand-new stuff, that's kind of what excited me as an artist.

The most important thing is, how can I move forward towards something that I can't articulate, that is new in storytelling with moving images and sound?

To be creative means to connect. It's to abolish the gap between the body, the mind and the soul, between science and art, between fiction and nonfiction.

It's so important to me that I feel like I'm doing something that's never been done before, whether that's in the show, or I'm writing a song. I can exist in this little box here, but I have to do something new with it.

I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.

I want to put everything I think I've learned about filmmaking and storytelling and put it to the test in other areas.