Al Pacino Quotes

Filmmaking is incredible introspective. It forces you to sort of examine yourself in new ways.

All of my books come from something that I happen to be working out at a given point in my life. It's kind of self-therapy.

Fight with yourself when you paint, not with the model. A student is one who struggles with himself for order.

The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.

I began observing, making paintings of my surroundings, taking a vow of silence, listening, composing music, writing, and making time for formal education. Then I started telling stories.

I look at the artistic process as like experiencing the world, channeling it through your personality and sending it back out there. That's the process.

Many artists use their own lives as a kind of case study to examine what it's like to be human.

Songwriting is like going to church. I'm connecting to something, and it's rewarding in really important ways. I don't need to share it with anyone to feel good about it.

The first record I spent five years writing and it was an amalgamation of all the things that happened in my life from the time I was fifteen to the time I was twenty.

I do have that mindset - that most good art comes from some turmoil, from someone trying to come to some equilibrium, or come up and get a breath.

It took me a while to find myself.

My shadow in my art is one way I trace who I was and where I have been. My shadow and I have been on a journey for quite a while now!

A writer needs a life of introspection.

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

I make movies about people in spiritual crisis because it's a way for me to spend the time, the energy, the focus and the obsession to come to terms with my own spiritual crisis.

Growing up, nobody I knew even knew a writer. So it was a big adventure and something that I've wrestled with my whole life. I think it's a journey worth taking, really finding out who you are and what you do well.

The music I make and the process of acting, for me, are both about trying to understand people and get inside what makes us tick. That's the main thing that excites me. Our sense of who we really are and what drives us.

I felt the need to get back to painting and I thought the best way was to start drawing, so I enrolled in a life drawing class. I soon discovered that people made very interesting subjects and I am still surprised that I had never discovered it before.

I feel the emotion that life conjures up and the songs I write get me closer to my feelings and realising who I am. It's a natural process.

'Red Planet' was a tough movie to make, and I learned a lot about myself. To me, that's a lot more interesting than how a movie does.

With every role that I do, I always see a little bit of me, a little bit of art and life.

Talking to other people about a part is not helpful for me. It's such an internal and complicated and still kind of mysterious process.

Every film has been a personal milestone for me.

When it comes down to the song writing, I'm just very slow - very slow. Because the songs are about my life, so I'm doing emotional work on myself.

For me, 'Soul Deep' wasn't an easy thing to do.