Edwin Catmull Quotes

Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty, how many ghastly, mortifying missteps, how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment, how partial all accomplishment is, how incomplete?

Writing is still like heaving bricks over a wall.

It is not for nothing that artists have called their works the children of their brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth.

To this day writing is the most painful thing to do.

Films are hard to make and I think the word indulge really leads one to believe that it's an easy sort of business and it's really extremely difficult.

Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.

No cross no crown.

Every play I do, every book I write, every painting I paint, I will struggle with. I don't know what it's like for a project to come easy.

The rewards for those who persevere far exceed the pain that must precede the victory.

All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.

Movies were a struggle for me - they didn't come easy.

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie.

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.

Creative output, you know, is just pain. I'm going to be cliche for a minute and say that great art comes from pain.

Film shouldn't be a pain. It's a creative process.

I think suffering has always been an incentive for my creativity.

It took me a good two-and-a-half to three years to write 'Dhobi Ghat' and more importantly be satisfied with it.

Some songs just fall out of you. And some you have to wrestle out like an abscess.

I wanted to complete 'Maryada Ramanna' in a short time, but it took me almost a year, and now 'Eega' took double the time, but in the end, it was worth it.

Yes, it was difficult - making 'The Act of Killing' in particular was a very lonely process. No one really believed in it until very close to the end. But it was also a sanctuary. I was working in obscurity.

Super-success is not for everyone, and you will endure weeks and months and years of hard work, obstacles, failures, victories, pain, and any manner of 'negative' experiences to reap the rewards of success, drink from the golden goblet, own the brass ring.

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

I don't know why songwriters struggle. They have to, I guess. If you're a young songwriter, quit struggling. It makes you look bad.

It's like you don't know you're making a record unless you're half-killing yourself.

It's hard to be an artist. It's hard to be anything. It's hard to be.