Catherine Fisher Quotes

When an artist becomes complacent, he dies.

The consequences of a lack of new knowledge is decades of stagnation: the next generation will be poorer than this one.

I watch people who are not driven by creativity any more, and I think how dull it must be to produce the same kind of thing. If you don't feel you're reaching something new, then don't do it.

If you say, 'You've made it,' then you kind of come to a standstill, and I don't think any actor wants to do that.

Comedians tend to find a comfort zone and stay there and do lamer versions of themselves for the rest of their career.

Artistic development is a thing of the past, sadly.

So, Japan as a country has lost its vigor; it feels very much closed in for various reasons.

When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.

If you've become a huge act and you're still doing the same music you wrote with your friends when you were making zero dollars, you're lazy.

History is moving the furniture around in the house of mankind just about everywhere but the U.S.A. Things have changed, except here, where people come and go through the rooms of state, and everything looks shabbier by the day, and lethargy eats away at the upholstery like an acid fog, and the walls reverberate with meaningless oratory.

I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I'd like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit.

The Egyptian hierarchy, the paternal despotism of China, were very fit instruments for carrying those nations up to the point of civilization which they attained. But having reached that point, they were brought to a permanent halt for want of mental liberty and individuality.

A culture that generates more backwardness with every generation.

It's like nothing's really happening. Our culture is almost dead.

The establishment can't change. It can't give people anything different; it can't make the turn.

After 'Place Beyond the Pines,' honestly, I was sick of myself. Sick of my own ideas. I wanted to do an adaptation, but everything I'd been reading, I just didn't understand it.

For awhile there, I kind of hit the plateau. Anytime you do that as an artist, one of two things can happen... you're either going to start to fall back off, or you're gonna start to rise.

Nearly all great civilizations that perished did so because they had crystallized, because they were incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions, new methods, new points of view. It is as though people would rather die than change.

Nothing happened, and nothing kept happening.

He had been standing still; for an artist, one of the more painful forms of death.

The avant-garde is now stranded in the past.

People are very adamant about maintaining a certain sound or a certain era, like, "There were three years of rap that were great, so let's just keep doing that." The genre itself is just stuck in place. It's been treading water for a while.

The West is boring itself to death! And talking itself to death!

Most artists have retired too absolutely; they grow rusty, inflexible to the flow of currents.

The great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.