John Updike Quotes

Sarah Vaughan is one of my greatest heroes. She personifies what an artist is all about, taking risks, daring to go beyond the boundaries of safety and convention. It takes courage to share your vulnerability.

I am proud being an artist who takes risks, who would walk off a cliff artistically. I won't settle for commercial reasons.

Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.

To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.

I really admire artists that are willing to take a different approach and a different angle to their shows.

As artists, we have to be brave. If we aren't brave, we aren't artists.

Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.

An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

I am tapping into a place in you that is unexplored, and very dangerous, but I think essential to the creative life of an artist.

I think I come from a time when all the artists I grew up with and I loved always used to try and push the boundaries, and there doesn't seem so much of that, really.

Obsession remains the price of creation, and the writer who declines that risk will come up with nothing more creative than 'The Foxes of Harrow' or 'Mrs. Parkington.'

Punk gave you a kind of chutzpah, so even trying to be a writer, I just thought, 'Well, I'm going to send poems to 'Radio Times,' short stories to the 'Observer,' just have a go.

I'm often asked how I shoulder the responsibility of films, but I've always believed in taking risks.

I think the best directors aren't afraid to ask questions.

There was a time when a studio executive would really love something and have no proof at all that it would work and just do it because they believed in it. That's how 'Star Wars' happened.

I know it's hard for people to imagine a time when 'Hamilton' wasn't 'Hamilton,' but for years, it was just this little thing that I was telling people about that didn't make any sense to anybody as I was describing it. But I loved it.

To me art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk.

All of my films have been very hard to understand at the script stage because they're very different. At the time I did them they were not conventional. The executives could only think in terms of what they'd already seen. It's hard for them to think in terms of what has never been done before.

Big ideas don't make them selves known as big. They begin with the little, ridiculous ideas that most people would discard or reject. Every successful picture I've done has really been based on taking a very flimsy, fleeting little idea, grabbing hold of it, and taking it seriously.

When all of your decisions are based on economics, you end up with a sameness of vision. You're not taking the risks, you're not exploiting the passions of your creators. You're manufacturing product for a huge vending machine.

I start movies with people that I believe in and people with visions, you know, that I believe in. And so if it doesn't kind of come together in the right way, at least I was doing it because I believed in the person and the movie.

[...] My wild words slip into fusion and risk losing the solid ground. So stranger, get wilder still. Probe the highlands.

We make pictures. At the end of the day, we create something potentially significant that did not exist at the beginning of the day. We go forward, despite the uncertainty. Because this is an act of love and passion, which defies reason and prudence.

It is true that there is a fine line between entrepreneurship and insanity. Crazy people see and feel things that others don't. But you have to believe that everything is possible. If you believe it, those around you will believe it too.