Joe McNally Quotes

If I knew where I was going, I wouldn't do it. When I can predict or plan it, I don't do it.

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

Play is experimenting with chance.

I Still Approach A Scene As One Would Approach A Guitar Solo. You Don't Exactly Know How You're Going To Phrase This Or That. Which I Think Is Beautiful. That Idea Of Chance.

I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I don't in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do.

All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.

But the wild is unpredictable, stuff does happen, and it's always when you're least expecting it.

Improvisation is terribly haphazard.

I consider projects very deeply, but there's always a point in your life where there's a bit of randomity.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, but that's what we face when we're dealing with improvisation.

I always leave room for serendipity and chance.

When you are live you never know what is going to happen.

With improvisation, I just do it. It might be a total failure but then you just throw the dice again.

In general, I don't know when inspiration will pop up.

If I planned everything out in advance, I'd expire of boredom.

When I put my brush to canvas, I never know what I'm going to paint. It's like when you're walking down the street with your hands in your pockets, humming a tune, you don't know what you'll be humming five minutes from now.

If you create a place where anything can happen, anything will happen.

You never know what's going to happen, not just after two months, but tomorrow, you never know what's going to happen.

If a piece of genius comes, it comes, and it if doesn't, it doesn't.

If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.

Energy and art go where they will.

Uncertainty is the fertile ground of pure creativity and freedom.

At every concert I leave a lot to the moment. I must have the unexpected, the unforeseen. I want to risk, to dare. I want to be surprised by what comes out. I want to enjoy it more than the audience. That way the music can bloom anew. It's like making love. The act is always the same, but each time it's different.

I can't know what I'm going to do before I'm in front of the lens. And I think that sort of makes it exciting.

When you allow yourself to be unpredictable, you step from the known into the unknown, where anything is possible