Geoffrey Beene Quotes

I almost literally wake up in the morning starting to think of my next idea. It's almost always driven by what's in the news. The hard part, really, is getting from knowing what I want to say to figuring out how to say it in an image. I'm still not entirely sure how to explain how that happens... Suddenly, something just works.

There was this song I was working on called 'Swing.' It was almost finished, but there was something missing, and I couldn't for the life of me figure it out. And then this little piece of information - this little tweet - came to the forefront of my mind.

I sometimes don't try to invent something. I wait for some kind of a direction - and it happens. I get an angle, for instance, and it just appears, and I say, 'Oh my God - that's it!'

The common, the quotidian, is so much more unyielding to me, really stubborn and hard to work with, and I like this because it makes me think and it makes me worry. I can't just plunge my hand into the meat of it. I need new approaches.

You think about the beauty and what you want to transmit. If I think about designing, I can't design.

I drape a lot. I cut. I have to touch. For me, it's almost impossible to start without that.

I try and reduce myself to an almost blank slate and hope to God that I am creative.

You don't actually have ideas; ideas have you.

I don't know how to explain it, but when you're working on something constantly, and you're digging in deep, things kind of fall in, and you grab them, and you're like, 'That one!' and 'That thing!' and it starts to build something right.

You can't rush inspiration.

Whenever I finish a movie, I usually go through a period where I think I'll never have another idea. And then, somehow, you get another idea.

I know it's strange, but I've always had a better time with other people's wild ideas. Coming up with my own is a deeply emotional and challenging thing to do.

Sometimes you feel like you have to do research to make something, other times you know you don't feel it so much.

[Mannerism is when] you think you have all these great ideas, and none of them are good at the end of the day. But while you are pursuing those other things subconsciously happen.

I've never been able to develop a movie over several years, and keep coming back to it and adding to it. I get excited by the spark of an idea, and if I can't go make that, there's another idea that comes along that I get excited about. It has to happen quickly, in order for it to happen, at all.

If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already – the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of.

If you have several ideas that all seem pretty good, work on the one that you think about, when you're not trying to think about work.

The different variables involved in anything creative, really, are massive. When it comes together, it just clicks, I suppose.

When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I'll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.

The toughest question has always been, "How do you get your ideas?" How do you answer that? It's like asking runners how they run, or singers how they sing. They just do it!

Artists today think of everything they do as a work of art. It is important to forget about what you are doing - then a work of art may happen.

We all have fertile creative periods and times when we can't figure out how we ever did it.

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.