Gulzar Quotes

You can't live in nostalgia-land.

I'll get an inspiration and start painting; then I'll forget everything, everything except how things used to be and how to paint it so people will know how we used to live.

I do not look back at what might have been. If I did that, playing golf would drive me crazy.

I don't generally listen to music while working, but sometimes music can help me get past minor writer's block.

I can't write a line without music - it provides just the right amount of distraction to keep me focused. Clearly, I still miss the noisy roommates.

It's a mistake to dwell too much on the consequences of a piece of work that you're making.

When I paint a picture of a house, that goes back to my roots.

I don't think you go to a play to forget, or to a movie to be distracted. I think life generally is a distraction and that going to a movie is a way to get back, not go away.

What I love about photography, and it's the same thing I love about acting, really, is that it forces you, like, right into the moment, where you can't be distracted, where you can't be, like, thinking about other things or ahead of yourself or behind yourself.

Dwell on the past and you will lose an eye. Forget the past and you will lose both eyes.

If I keep thinking about yesterday, tomorrow might never come.

If you are always talking about the past, then you don't really have much in the present.

Nostalgia has always been a key player in my songwriting cause within that space I find a great deal of inspiration.

I'm not too interested in talking about the past. It doesn't do us any good whatsoever.

Regret is an appalling waste of energy, and no one who intends to be a writer can afford to indulge in it.

Right now, though, I wanted not to think forward or backward, but only to lose myself in the words.

You cannot cross the narrow bridge of art carrying all its tools in your hands. Some you must leave behind.

Dwelling in the past prevents doing something in the present.

A lot of artists use memories. A lot of prose writers, a lot of poets, a lot of songwriters, refer back to something. Generally it's all you've got, unless you're brilliant and can write totally in the now.

All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.

A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.

There's this whole idea that you've got the blues and you're going to write. Bullshit. When I feel really bad, all I want to do is sit in front of the TV with the remote control and check out.

There's no future in our past. Just experience. We want to return to it, but we don't want to close the door on it either.

It’s a lesson in life—don’t look back, you’ll trip over.