Philip Seymour Hoffman Quotes

Genre expectations can kill creativity. If you do something different, it will get hated. The best filmmakers can do everything on the approval list and knock it out of the park. For me, I have a hard time being creative when I have to color in between the lines.

No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.

I've hardly had an avant-garde career... If you're going to make a film, you have to try to make sure it comes out of a childlike passion, as if you're doing it for the first time.

The interesting thing about doing a play is to find a way to make it fresh and do it as though you were doing it for the first time.

I have to believe everything I write is brand new and I'm writing in this way about these people in a completely new situation for the very first time.

One of the things that's great about doing a show over and over again... is that you have to find ways to make it spontaneous, as though everything is happening for the first time... to continue to mine the material and find new things.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

When you play, it's like you know that there are people out there who are hearing it for the first time, and I think that's really important.

With each film, you are still trying to get the length and measure right. And failure is all about others' perception of you. When you have one success, they think you know it all. But if you fail, they think they know it all.

I'd rather not ever make anything overly simple just because I'm scared people won't get it.

I kind of roll my eyes when people say they make music for themselves or they make art just for themselves, because, maybe in their head, what that means is that they're making it for someone who they don't think is real. Their audience isn't real. But it's still a communicative act. It's still an outward manifestation of longing.

[In art] you are telling the reader or the listener or the viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition.

I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognising that he knows, that is what destroys creation. That is what makes school.

A fine artist is one who makes familiar things new and new things familiar.

If a director says he doesn't care how many people see his films at all, I simply don't believe him. Otherwise why would he bother to make the film? The only explanation would be that it would be an act of masturbation. I think that every creator is looking for a receptor. He's looking for an audience. There are two parts of the equation: a creator and, necessarily, the receiver of the work. It's the same thing for a painter who wants his paintings to be seen.

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.

I have spent 20 years writing these books. Had I wanted to say men are beasts and scream, that takes 30 seconds.

If you give the audience what they expect, they'll be bored. There are no rules: You do what you want while respecting the boundaries. You don't poke people in the eye; you do things they haven't seen before and make it accessible, funny and clever.

When you make a record, your own record, and you don't even recognize it yourself, it's hard to think if anybody else is going to recognize.

I have been both overpraised and underpraised. I assume by the time I finish writing -- and I plan to go on writing until I'm 90 or gaga -- it will all equal itself out.

I'm bored by repeating myself, and I would imagine that an audience would be bored by me repeating myself.

People who leave their own time out of their work cannot be surprised if their time fails to find them interesting.

Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience.

If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up.

Usually it seems like either you sacrifice something and a lot of people will pay attention, or you stay true to yourself and appeal to a smaller group of people, but now we've managed to do what we felt was the right thing to do in our heart and had it reach a wide audience. It feels very rare.