John Updike Quotes

The ultimate thing is creating your own stuff and making projects for yourself. That's what Seth Rogen does. He's writing and producing a lot of the movies that he's the lead in.

I wanted to express myself more fully through writing and directing. It just feels like a package deal. Anytime you create anything, you try to exert mastery over your world.

You make a movie that is about what you want it to be about and let people have their reaction to it.

I was always going to direct. I wasn't going to hand my characters over to anyone else.

Any time you turn off and let someone else make any artistic decision for you, you make a mistake.

You're the artist - you make the music that you want to make.

My dream is to do whatever I want without any interference from the record company.

Of course it's super special to create your own records; it really is a part of my self.

The worst thing you can do to anybody trying to be creative is to demand participation in their vision.

Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.

A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too.

On the last couple of movies I made - big-budget Hollywood movies - I really missed being able to create my own material.

As a writer, as a creator, I'm giving you my experiences. But just take what I give you. You ain't got to pry beyond that.

I guess I created LeRoy Neiman. Nobody else told me how to do it. Well, I'm a believer in the theory that the artist is as important as his work.

I can shoot off my big mouth and write my shows and run my shows, and I can recognize how lucky I am because my position is rare and my position is privileged.

When I'm writing music, I'm not playing a character. I'm not Alice Cooper or Gene Simmons or someone like that, who has acknowledged that they are writing music for a character.

Creative freedom is an imperative for me, but it doesn't really exist in a Hollywood game.

I believe in creative control. No matter what anyone makes, they should have control over it.

There are a lot of global decisions that you can make as a co-publisher, and only publishers can make those kind of decisions. At the same time, there are some things you can do only as a penciler or creator. I want to keep my hands in both pots, so to speak.

The potential success that could come with signing with a major label didn't quite outweigh how important it was for me to make my music the way I knew it needed to be made.

I make the kind of music I like.

I'm not an artist who has an agenda that's set by the work.

I'm a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

I'd rather sell 10,000 records that represent me than 2 million that don't represent me at all.

I allowed artists to play for as long as they felt they could justifiably continue to create.