John D'Agata Quotes

But I'm never gonna get to a point in my life where what it costs to shoot a movie is going to determine what it is. The limits of my imagination is the only thing that's gonna stop me.

There's a good many pictures I'd like to make; we'll see how many I'll be allowed to make.

When you give an artist a canvas, you shouldn't tell him exactly how much paint to put on it, or exactly how sharp the images should be. You should let the artist get going.

We are going to finish this picture just the way I want it... because you cannot compromise an artist's vision.

Someone who is an artist can say, 'I can create and can make what I create disappear.'

I am an artist, and I will always be working. But a film should match my personality and should be primarily based on a woman for me to go forward with it.

Young people have realised that an artist is in charge of what they're doing - this crazy cynicism that artists were puppets has disappeared.

One of the beauties of being an artist is that you can create a whole new world, with circumstances that are better in your invented world than they are in the real world.

Novels allow me to create a whole world.

Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.

I'm trying to do the kind of projects that I want to see in the theatre.

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'.

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.

There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.

With the success of 'Spiderwick,' it's allowed me to be able to have the freedom to really be able to tell the stories that I really wanted to tell, that I've always wanted to tell.

Art is the triumph over chaos.

So much of art-making is about reducing things to the essentials, so I don't feel particularly crippled by this. I don't want it to look natural because then I would be making a documentary film.

Any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.

It has nothing to do with commercial success. You cannot calculate in your head how to put the mosaic together to make a commercial film: that's out of the question.

There's not a lot of art forms where you can control your presentation and your ideas.

I just make the movies I want to see. I've always been that way.

The things that I'm interested in directing are fiction, because then you're not married to a particular reality.

When you're writing, it's so absorbing. It's like a drop cloth goes over you, and the world outside falls away, but you do have a miniature version of the world, your own world, that you actually have some control over. I love to work.