Susanna Phillips Quotes

You work on an idea, your first interpretation is very raw and you work it and you work it and it gets polished and polished. It gets to a certain level and then it comes down off that peak.

Part of creating is understanding that there is always more to do; nothing is ever completely finished.

Edits are very important to me - they're the way in which I work on everything.

Nothing is invented and perfected at the same time.

A lot of the qualities in 'Killing and Dying' is sort of a response to work I'd done previously. I wanted to push myself in some different directions.

It is the adage of any creative thing; it looks terrible, it is an ugly baby, until the very last second.

I like to think that I've gotten better at what I do. I spend more time and pay more attention to detail album after album. But pretty much it's stayed the same.

My usual route is, I do a play at South Coast Rep, then there's time between and I revise it, and then I take it to New York.

I used to play works in progress to people, but now I wait 'til it's finished, because you make excuses all the time: 'Well, there's gonna be an orchestra on it.' Rather than make excuses, wait 'til it's finished, and then they can say they don't like it.

I think my tendency when working is to try and find what's lacking in my current project and then tackle that in whatever I do next.

I'll keep evolving and put that into my songs.

I never do any album to beat it. I do it to extend it.

Change means that what was before wasn't perfect. People want things to be better.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

Perfection is the child of time.

You start with an idea but then so many things can happen.

You know, if I wrote the arrangements two years from now, they would probably be a lot slicker.

The urge to purge the material I come up with is, I guess, an ongoing process.

Perfection is immutable. But for things imperfect, change is the way to perfect them.

I never see songs as permanent. I'm always in a state of revising everything.

Over the course of those 12 episodes we discarded what didn't work and kept what did and that refined it.

All of the good stuff is going to be done in the future. The stuff we are doing now is crummy compared with what will finally mature.

I tend to arrive in the rehearsal process with very strongly developed ideas about what I want to do. But I don't like those ideas to be things that are not subject to change, or subject to development, or subject to challenge.

To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.

If I was painting a picture, I wouldn't want to take a picture of a single paint stroke. I'd rather show people what it looks like when it's done.