Annie Leibovitz Quotes

We actors are superstitious creatures. We do all the homework, and we put all of the components together, but there's always one key aspect that we're not in charge of, really, and that's magic. You are always on the lookout for where and how that magic is going to ignite.

As artists, we are so not in control most of the time of the content or the narrative of our characters, and sometimes writing takes a turn and it's not something we necessarily have control over. It's just a lot of random dumb luck, so when things click, you've just got to enjoy it.

I don't tend to say it's time for one of this or that genre. Things flow to you in a strange way, and why you bump into a certain kind of thing in one moment is...it's hard to explain.

You cannot overestimate the role of intuition in fiction writing. Or the role of accident or randomness. These things are very central. This is never really admitted. You have to cover the pages. You have to have those people do things. And the things they do have to be relevant to the entire concern. The specific things they do don't much matter, you just have to have them do something that counts.

I Still Approach A Scene As One Would Approach A Guitar Solo. You Don't Exactly Know How You're Going To Phrase This Or That. Which I Think Is Beautiful. That Idea Of Chance.

We actors are superstitious creatures. We do all the homework and we put all of the components together, but there's always one key aspect that we're not in charge of, really, and that's magic. You are always on the lookout for where and how that magic is going to ignite. When you have worked as much as I have and have sought it out as often as I do, you get very clear that it will come at very, very odd, unexpected moments.

I cant duplicate my own successes, because part of the creation of that effect is making something happen that you didn't expect

Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process--it is, after all, black magic.

Although idea and form are ultimately paramount in my work, so too are chance, accident, and rawness.

Movies are magical. Sometimes it just works, it catalyzes, and everything falls into place, and no one knows exactly how or why.

That's what's great about the arts. Everything inspires you, and you get a chance to grow from watching other people and how they do their work.

Innovation is serendipity, so you don't know what people will make.

I never know what I'm going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I'm just the middleman.

Books are magic: you never know where they're going to end up.

As soon as I start reading, drawing comes to me more easily. I find I work in my sketchbooks more. But if I'm working on a new show, my reading completely stops except when I'm on a plane. I take a stack of New Yorkers with me. I feel awful about those stacks of New Yorkers.

I don't know, my music has always just come from where the wind blew me. Like where I'm at during a particular moment in time.

In general, I don't know when inspiration will pop up.

My work is on the one hand laboured, and on the other completely happenstance and intuitive.

I don't know - it's a bit of a mystery of how things come about when they do. I don't have a scientific explanation for it. Sometimes when you're writing a song, you don't know where you're going.

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

Getting to No. 1 makes everyone feel better; of course it does. But it's swings and roundabouts with these things. Sometimes you make a great record, and it clicks with people. And other times it passes them by; there's nothing you can do. It's still the same record.

In using chance operations, the mind is enriched.

You never know where inspiration is going to come from.

All that I've done in my life thus far, all the poems and all the pictures, are not so much an intermingling of my life with art but a divine accident.