Albert Brooks Quotes

The rigors of creativity - the self-doubt, the revising, the solitude - do require a kind of self-consumption. It comes at a cost; a cost that isn't for everyone.

I think there's no creative process that goes without injuries and scratches and punches. You get beat up somehow, and that's part of the commitment. You have to be open to that.

I figure that that has a ten year cycle. At the end of that ten years, I began to get worried that I would run into what is known as the writer's block, the feeling of not being able to do these things.

In all fields of creativity you see the result of work that has become habit. Where the creative impulse has become flaccid or has died out altogether, and yet because it is our work and our life we continue to do it.

That's always the time to quit - when you have nothing to say as an artist and creative person.

I never ever see a film of mine after I release it to the public. I see it when I shoot it in my dailies and while I'm editing it, re-editing it and reshooting it and all that. By the time it's finished I never want to see it again.

People wrestle sometimes making movies, and I think that conflict is a very essential thing. I think a lot of very happy productions have produced a lot of very banal movies.

I guess I'll just slip into the studio after the next time with the Muses, and then just keel over and die.

If I feel like I've completely drained every ounce of energy out of me for this song, and I can't go any further with it, then I stop, even if the song is unfinished. Most of the time, when it's finished, it's because I've used every ounce of me to write it.

As creators, we feel constant demand for innovation from the world. This puts immense pressure on the creative process and oftentimes can have a dampening effect.

I tend to not listen to my own music when I'm not working on it. No real reason other than it's nice to get away from it.

Many artists give up after a while.

At Pixar, we do a million versions of the movie, and every one of them goes through their awkward teenage phase where it's terrible and doesn't make sense, and we just keep working on it.

You never make it, especially in this industry where you constantly churn out stuff, things. You never finish.

Well, I just think through your career you go through different phases, and I just got sort of uninspired by the whole studio process of making and releasing films.

I believe an artist dies twice. The first time, it's just terrible - I've been there when the phone isn't ringing for years.

It's physically and psychologically exhausting to make a film.

You look at most artists, the arc of their career, there's a definite decline at the end. And that decline could set in at any time. In your 50s, or your 60s and 70s if you're lucky. Time goes by fast, and you've got to be busy all the time.

With any kind of artistic thing, it's a muscle, like any athlete, and the moment you're not doing it, you lose all confidence. That's why I'm terrible with down time.

I've written some great things. That's a gift, but there's consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.

My own image of my work is that I no sooner settle into something than a break occurs. These breaks are always painful and depressing but despite them I see that there's a consistency that holds out, but is hard to define.

I believe that writers run out of material, I really do. I believe very strongly in the fact that when the natural time is up, writers actually do run out of material. To me it's black and white. When there's a song there's a song, when there's not there's not.

There are whole months at a time when my head is so full of ideas that I wake in the middle of the night and lie in the dark telling myself stories. There are also long, dark nights when I just know I'll never write another word: I'm finished, empty, a husk... Oh dear, yes, twitch, yawn, how I've suffered insomnia for my art.

At some point in the idea process, I simply wear myself down and force myself to choose. But here's the thing: Once I do choose, suddenly all the other possibilities wither and die, and thus I never have a backlog of well-formed ideas waiting for me when my latest book gets finished.

Whenever I finish a movie, I usually go through a period where I think I'll never have another idea. And then, somehow, you get another idea.