Paul Schrader Quotes

I've directed a couple of times in the theater, but I wouldn't make a habit of it because it's too consuming.

There is no facet of my professional life that doesn't require or request improvisation.

I don't get nervous when I'm directing a play. It's not like acting.

I don't work with a lot of preparation. I think very well on my feet, and I'm very good when the pressure is on.

Sometimes, disaster can inspire ingenuity.

Design is a solution to a problem. Art is a question to a problem.

You jump off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down.

I started directing out of necessity, the first play I wrote in college because I didn't know anyone who could direct it.

I sort of dreamed about directing before my career as an actor took off. I've directed stage before in so many capacities on tours. I put that together. You have to. Otherwise, it's your statement. It's your voice, and that has to come through.

Design is a response to a specific problem. You are given a problem to solve, and then you let the problem itself tell you what your solution is.

Give ordinary people the right tools, and they will design and build the most extraordinary things.

So that is the design process or the creative process. Start with a problem, forget the problem, the problem reveals itself or the solution reveals itself and then you reevaulate it. This is what you are doing all the time.

The performance is created by the director. The actor is the material. And I think that has to be true.

I think the whole thing that Jamie [Hyneman] and I have in working together is that we are constantly simplifying each other's designs, and we both appreciate that the quickest and the dirtiest solution is usually the most elegant, the least expensive, and the fastest.

Sometimes there are accidents in our lives the skillful extrication from which demands a little folly.

This is one of the glories of man, the inventiveness of the human mind and the human spirit: whenever life doesn't seem to give an answer, we create one.

A good designer can create a design that accommodates all the constraints and still delivers an elegant, satisfying experience to the user. A great designer can go beyond this and create a design that demonstrates that some of those constraints weren’t really there to begin with.

The intellectual equipment needed for the job of the future is an ability to define problems, quickly assimilate relevant data, conceptualize and reorganize the information, make deductive and inductive leaps with it, ask hard questions about it, discuss findings with colleagues, work collaboratively to find solutions and then convince others.

We may need to solve problems not by removing the cause but by designing the way forward even if the cause remains in place.

Actually there were [ in MacGyver] a lot of things about the original that focused on the character, but not too many people seem to remember that.

Creativity, not money, is used to solve problems.

See every problem as an opportunity to exercise creative energy.

I look in my closet, and if I need it, I design it.

Innovation is hard because solving problems people didn't know they had & building something no one needs look identical at first.

It's easy, there's a trick to it, you do it or you die.