Adrien Brody Quotes

I just try to do things that make me excited. If I can find a way to surprise myself, then that's when I'm really excited to share something and really can stand behind it.

There has to be that zeal to do something new and surprise yourself and audiences. You have to stay true to your craft, and that should never be sidelined.

If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.

There's no room for being a visionary in the studio system. It literally cannot exist.

I always wanted to be really experimental.

I learned with 'The Disaster Artist,' when I was writing the book, the audience will follow you if you really try to do something different. The biggest thing is, you want to be genuine and try to surprise your audience with kind of a new direction.

I want to encourage Filipino artists to be original, write your own songs and don't be afraid to go outside the box and try new things.

I don't want to limit myself to any genre or language or a type. I want to always surprise the audience and, hence, keep raising the bar for myself.

Write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

Every act of genuine creativity means achieving a higher level of self-awareness and personal freedom.

An artist's job is to surprise himself. Use all means possible.

When you're an artist, all you're trying to do is self-express.

If you stick with a vision, it might not all work, but some of it will be absolute genius. To me, 15 minutes worth of absolute genius in a film is so much better than two hours of mediocrity. I would rather pay to see something different like that.

What I try to do as an actor is constantly find that, find ways to risk, find opportunities to fall on my face if it's going to be worth it, and then maybe I'll surprise myself.

My respect for artists is very high. I think to get the most out of them, you have to liberate them. I think part of liberating them is saying, 'Come up with something brilliant, new, and fresh. Stop thinking based on what has been beat into you by executives or publishers in terms of what's going to work and what's not. Don't react, just act.'

To create something you must be something.

I wanted each of my books to be very different from the others, each to be special and uncategorizable, and I knew I could only do that a few times before I was in danger of repeating myself.

Our responsibility as artists is to challenge ourselves.

No age is compelled to take its beauty from preceding epochs.

Being an artist is in part an act of rupture.

I like surprising myself. I don't want to do the norm, do what I'm always known to do, write how I like to write.

I am proud being an artist who takes risks, who would walk off a cliff artistically. I won't settle for commercial reasons.

Creativity shouldn't be following radio; it should be the other way around.

I always try to improve, to find new ways of expressing myself, to keep looking for truth and originality.

The big cop-out would be to accept popularity rather than opting to try to create potent work. It's so easy to do the popular thing, the expected thing, and that's where you start to cheat yourself - and your fans, in the end - because there's an inherent dishonesty in pandering and dishing up what everyone's expecting.