Richard MacDonald Quotes

I can't sculpt. But if I were a sculptor, as you start to get something that actually looks like what you want, then it starts to be fun. That's the way I find writing.

My work always comes from the same source - from movement. It doesn't necessarily come from an outside idea, though the source can be something small or large that I've seen, often birds or other animals. The seeing can then provoke the imagining.

Now I really make the little idea from clay, and I hold it in my hand. I can turn it, look at it from underneath, see it from one view, hold it against the sky, imagine it any size I like, and really be in control almost like God creating something.

Indeed, an engineer designing a structure is not unlike an artist painting one. Both start with nothing but talent, experience, and inspiration. The fresh piece of paper on the drawing board is as blank as the newly stretched piece of canvas.

To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don't use a computer when I write, and I don't use a piano. I'm at a desk writing, and it's very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.

I'm not a designer, I'm a creator.

I think very abstractly when I'm writing. Then, as the project moves on, it becomes more like sculpting.

Cutting into color reminds me of the sculptor's direct carving.

Filmmaking is finding a piece of granite and you start to chip away and then you have the shape of a head, the shape of the arm, you can see the shape of the face and the face starts to gather character. You have to find it.

With sculpting, nothing is cloudy or mystical. It's just about this object, and if you're trying to depict reality, and you do it well, then the outcome is the truth.

Photographs are two-dimensional. I work in four dimensions.

A chair, it's like a sculpture. It starts as a thought and then becomes an idea, something I might think about for years. When the time is right, I express it on paper, usually as a simple line in space. Finally, it takes shape.

There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.

Conception, my boy, fundamental brain work, is what makes all the difference in art.

I don't work from drawings. I don't make sketches and drawings and color sketches into a final painting.

I come in. I'm going to sketch, I'm going to drape, I don't know what I'm going to do.

I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.

When you're drawing something, you kind of run a movie in your head. You might close your eyes or stare into the distance and kind of see a movie unfolding and, you know, grab a certain moment or think, 'Oh, yeah, that's when we need just the point that he appears around the corner but just as she's getting into the car,' you know?

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

I love producing! It's so much fun to start with a blank canvas and create the picture you want to create and see it all come together.

To some extent, I draw on what I see around me; in other places, I imagine what I write.

I sometimes think that what I do as a writer is make a kind of colouring book, where all the lines are there, and then you put in the colour.

I think if you want to do a thing properly you have to take a lot of care. I've always found it's easier to draw comics if you know clearly in your head what you're drawing, rather than if you try and make it up as you go along.

I have to take it as a given that I have got a certain ability to do something. I can be an artist, which is take something and transform it into another thing. I can just see something, and I can see my painting.

It's very important to understand that we never do the same thing twice; each of our projects is unique. We'll never do another 'Gates.' Each project is a unique image. We do not know in advance how the work will look. I do preparatory drawings, but they are only projections of our vision.