Oscar Niemeyer Quotes

I always kept the fans happy. They always saw a different Rey, whether it was a mask, a design, a color. I never gave them the same thing twice and always kept them on their feet. They were always excited to see what Rey was going to bring to the table.

Good art should elicit a response of 'Huh? Wow!' as opposed to ‘Wow! Huh?'

Good theater is not what is expected, but what surprises.

I want people to be blown away when I do what they don't expect.

Every once in a while, when the audience is expecting to see one thing, you have to show them something else.

The thing I have always tried to do is surprise people: to present them with something they didn't expect.

I search for surprise in my architecture. A work of art should cause the emotion of newness.

When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.

You have to keep surprising your audience.

I'm always very excited by something that's a curveball or from left field.

I like to do something different that people don't expect. That's what I've always been about, in everything I do.

I don't feel I'm trying to make art. I'm trying to make interesting things. People can relate to that.

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

If innovations were predictable, they wouldn't be discoveries.

I like the unknown. That's what Terry Malick has always really liked. He's always looking for the unexpected.

A magic show and a concert are very similar in the way I like keeping things a mystery and not doing them the same way every time. The listener and the audience never know what's going to happen next.

What's challenging is to surprise the audience.

The element of surprise is the most important thing and what keeps me interested in writing. I can feel it if I've written that predictable or boring line, and I will carry that around with me all day.

I feel the best way to respect my audience is to not give them what they expect from me... 'cause it's fun that way.

It's good to give people a jolt. If they're expecting one thing, it's important to give them something else. If you do something startling, audiences might at first freak out, but then they start to think, 'This is not going to be conventional. I'm going to enjoy this.'

We try to keep audiences coming back in greater numbers by doing the unexpected and not simply following a pattern or a mold or a formula.

I like to surprise myself. I like to surprise my fans, too.

Often, I go and see films where I can see the beats coming. So, if I read something where I don't see the beats coming and it takes me somewhere unexpected, that's a great thing to build upon.

There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of saying a thing becomes a part of what is said, every work of art is unique and requires fresh attention.

Art always demands of us something new.