Terry Wogan Quotes

I would like the work to be non-work. This means that it would find its way beyond my preconceptions...It is the unknown quantity from which and where I want to go. As a thing, an object, it accedes to its non-logical self. It is something, it is nothing.

My art is not limited to the songs I create but also to the reaction it creates. I like to sit back and look at the whole thing as if it's a tornado that I'm controlling. It's creating chaos. When you create chaos, ideas are turned upside down, and everybody looks at things in a different way.

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.

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

Maybe I wasn't just the traditional-type person or whatever. I got to the top, but I got there maybe unconventionally. It wasn't just a straight line.

Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously.

The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight.

Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know.

We’re taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty, dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely different path. It’s exciting, actually. To me, solving problems is a bit like a drug. You’re on it, and you can’t get off.

My ambition is to keep the audience guessing... that is my path to a long career.

U2's best work has always been when we didn't know what we're doing.

The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control - to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children's cartoons or utopian novels. But it's just a fantasy.

When I do a take, I very often try things that I haven't planned to try to see if I can pull it off.

I like the challenge of trying different things and wondering whether it's going to work or whether I'm going to fall flat on my face.

My plays have been strange from the beginning, and they never got unstrange.

What can I do, I asked myself, that is so spectacular that no one will be able to say he had seen it before? The answer was perfectly obvious. I would send a midget up to bat.

You've got to put interesting people around you; you've got to work with people who are gonna inspire you to take the songs you've written into a completely different direction, because there's nothing more boring than going to the studio and predictably knowing what is going to happen.

There was always that thing with 'Johnny' - I always saw myself as his writer and PR. But when he got out there, I had no control. His whole thing was going off on those flights of fancy. Going, 'Let's see what we can possibly do that hasn't been done before up here.' And when it works, it's lovely; it's a great night.

People can't really place me. They're not really sure who I am.

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

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.

I take chances. I don't limit myself. I don't think anybody who listens to Boston would have predicted hearing a female rapper on the beginning of the song 'Sail Away.' But that's what fit.

My methodology is not knowing what I'm doing and making that work for me.

It might be a huge hit, it might not; but you learn something doing it.

If you are truly innovating, you don't have a prototype you can refer to.