Novalis Quotes

With improvisation, I just do it. It might be a total failure but then you just throw the dice again.

I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.

So much of making movies is about discovery on the day, what you're figuring out. If you know everything going in, then it's not worth doing - it's already done.

If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.

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

You never know with these things when you're trying something new what can happen. This is all experimental.

At its best, life is completely unpredictable.

Expose yourself to as much randomness as possible.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, but that's what we face when we're dealing with improvisation.

In 1965, I was teaching a seminar on freedom when I told my students that the ultimate freedom lay in casting a dice to decide what to do. They were so shocked and fascinated that I knew I had to write the book.

I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes or variations that lead to mastery... I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty. Other qualities may be more conducive to achievement, publicity, success; but they are all outworn - as outworn as ideologies, opinions, concepts and names for things.

The essence of play is that the sequence of actions is fluid and scattered.

I like to experiment, and my life has been eventful.

Life isn't a science. We make it up as we go.

If I planned everything out in advance, I'd expire of boredom.

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.

Certain things you have to stumble on to. They can't be preprogrammed.

In using chance operations, the mind is enriched.

I do like not knowing where I'm going, wandering in strange woods, whistling and following bread crumbs.

Everything is an experiment.

The only safe thing in filmmaking is to take a chance.

You try a lot of things and you don't know what the hell you're doing. If you're actually inventing something you shouldn't know what you're doing.

Much of the excitement we get out of our work is that we don't really know what we are doing.

It often feels like a tremendous amount of work is required to get an idea moving forward, like pushing a train uphill. But at a certain point, the thing takes on its own momentum, and takes unexpected turns. So it's that feeling of holding on, rather than pushing it, that is the most exciting thing. It's that need to occasionally bounce off the walls, letting anything happen for any reason, and having nothing to guide you that is the joy.

Artists of all disciplines must be willing to go into the dark, let go control, be surprised.