Samuel Beckett Quotes

I think a craft becomes an art form when the space of possible solutions becomes so huge that engineering can't carry you through.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

On occasion I have drawn as a release from painting. The economy in using paper, pencil, charcoal and crayon can help towards a greater gamble and higher rewards. I also find that drawing can generate ideas more rapidly than painting.

I'm living as an artist, and that's a staggering feeling, it's a total luxury. And because you have this amazing chance, with so much freedom, I'm determined to make something that is worth that. I feel this responsibility - to create something that makes an audience feel, which takes them somewhere. But that's very hard to achieve.

I think that designers have an incredibly broad creative repertoire. They solve. They create images of perfection for any number of clients. I could never do that. I'm my client. That's the difference between an artist and a designer; it's a client relationship.

I love being creative. I love acting, but I also love directing because you get to have a vision for the whole and bring that vision to fruition.

The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.

When I begin, theoretically and practically I can smear anything I want on the canvas. Then there's a condition I have to react to, by changing it or destroying it.

I talk to all the creative directors today, and they take me aside, and they say, 'You know, it must have been great back in those days when you could do anything you wanted.' I say, 'Huh? Excuse me?' I mean, we fought. In the '60s and '70s, you fought wars with clients, and you have to continue fighting wars to do great work.

That is the artistic task: To choose the best from these solutions.

At least I want to be making films that are somehow born out of me that are stories I want to tell. The challenge is figuring out how to do it where you can make them personal, yet still deliver to an audience a film experience that is satisfying and emotional, and that's what I'm trying to do.

Art is the triumph over chaos.

If you have the ideas, and you're a creative person, then you don't really differentiate in how your ideas manifest themselves.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty, how many ghastly, mortifying missteps, how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment, how partial all accomplishment is, how incomplete?

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

I always conceive a piece as a different set of challenges.

I feel like every artist has an opportunity to create something new and to challenge themselves to reach out to a new crowd.

And, we put a lot more value, or at least I personally put a lot more value, on the creative values and creative challenges of something than the commercial necessities.

Making television is difficult. Making any art is difficult.

Sometimes, trying to make a work of art can be very difficult and very painful.

With 'Acoustic Soul,' I saw my music as sparse. But I didn't do that because I was making a commitment to be commercial. That's what made 'Acoustic Soul' so difficult to produce. It took 2 1/2 years because I couldn't figure out what I wanted and still be commercial.

I know someone might look at a creative person's job and think it's pretty fun. It is. It's the best thing in the world, but it's also extremely challenging to carve out your own completely unique path and not following a default path that someone else has already paved.

I always like to write myself into a corner. I think the best stuff comes from only having a few ways out.

You don't have to compose a masterpiece every time, but I think the challenge of art is always searching for something different, searching for a new sensitivity, a new perspective, a new vision.