Nell Scovell Quotes

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.

Once I actually get in the studio and I start working, I'm fine, but it's just getting there and these hours of torment with myself and self doubt, thinking 'I'm useless' and 'Who am I, conning myself into thinking I can do it again.'

Usually, I work every day, seven days a week. When I go three days without writing, my body aches with anxiety; my mood is irritable. My night dreams grow wild with unconscious invention.

I don't know how to produce work if it's not something that's deeply scaring me or troubling me.

Every single time I step into the studio, I say, 'Can I still do this? Do I still have it? Have I ever had it?' I suppose there's a good amount of self-loathing that goes into any form of artisanship.

For me, the most difficult piece is the one I'm about to make.

I think one thing that's important to maintain is a sense of fear, always doubting yourself... a good dose of insecurity helps your work in some ways.

Each project, I suffer like I'm starting over again in life. There's a lot of healthy insecurity that fuels this stuff.

To me, creative work is labor, like any other kind of labor. It's got value, and it takes your time, and it's useful to people, depending.

People speak of the fear of the blank canvas as though it is a temporary hesitation, a trembling moment of self-doubt. For me it was more like being abducted from my bed by a clown, thrust into a circus arena with a wicker chair, and told to tame a pissed-off lion in front of an expectant crowd.

I become absolutely reclusive when I'm not working, to the point where I question whether I can actually do it again.

I have a paranoia that 'Ablutions' is the best thing I'll ever do.

At every premiere, I stand in the back, I never sit, worrying. And then maybe I hear them laugh or whatever, and the muscles unclench a little. But always, I feel like it's a fluke, that I'll never be able to do it again.

When I do solo material I definitely tend to overthink it. I make a lot of rules for myself that are a little bit arbitrary and... it's just painful.

I rarely like the music I make. It's like nothing's good enough. I just stay in my head, waiting on the next best beat, so I can do something better than what I did.

Each time you take a good picture, you have the wonderful feeling of exhilaration... and almost instantly, the flip side. You have this terrible, terrible anxiety that you've just taken your last good picture.

I am always in self-doubt... every moment of my filmmaking. I am supremely confident when the story is being written and everything is in our head. But the moment we get into the filmmaking, I start doubting myself - from the camera angle to the re-recording to getting the actors to do their shots.

The worst time for me is in the final few hours of taking a track that you've worked on for two years and bouncing it down to the final stereo mix. The overwhelming emotion for me is complete and utter fear that I've made a mistake. I'm scared. Afterward, I obsess endlessly about it.

A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.

The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.

It's often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It's what writing comes down to--worrying that things aren't going to work out.

That's the trouble with awards for a body of work. They always come at both a good time and a wrong time. Good because they tell you what you've been doing was worth the doing and wrong because they ought to come when you're young and excited and hungry for assurance that what you're doing is worth the doing.

I do everything I watch, whether it's like a big comic book film that I've done or something very serious and raw.I do have that initial feeling like I'm the worst, this is awful, my work is - I've let everybody down. I definitely have that.

I think after doing Push and Shove and having it not be successful, I lost a lot of confidence. Songwriting, for me, has always been traumatic, and I've always made all these excuses. But I've realized that you have to just accept that it was a gift: "I don't know where it came from, I don't know how I did it, but I did write all those songs, and I gotta do it again."

I think that when you create something or at least try to create something, you slither between excitement and pleasure and you understand this huge emotional frustration. You did one feat, then you go back one.