Robert Brustein Quotes

A director without a vision is a catastrophe.

I am convinced that in the arts, committees are useless. What is necessary are people like Karajan, [fellow recording producer John] Culshaw and me; we know not only how to achieve the best artistic results but how to attract the public and carry out the whole operation with carefully chosen collaborators. Democracy is fatal for the arts; it leads only to chaos or the achievement of new and lower common denominators of quality.

There are two qualities that I've noticed in good directors: One is that they have their vision very strongly in place; and two is that they listen to everyone's opinion and still remember their vision.

My tendency as an actor was to correct people, was to say, 'What if we tried it this way, what about if we tried that way?' That's terrible habit for an actor, but that's a good habit for director. So I became a director.

Directing is such a high. It's the hardest job ever, but I really love doing it.

I think that's the job of a director really, to sort of funnel all the creativity into one centralized point of being.

An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.

Becoming artistic directors is an enormous responsibility and not one that we take lightly.

You can't blame the President for the state of the country, it's always the poets' fault. You can't expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don't have it in them. Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold.

My goal, if I was going to do art, fine art, would have been to become Picasso or greater. That always sounds so funny to people, comparing yourself to someone in the past that has done so much, and in your life you’re not even allowed to think that you can do as much. That’s a mentality that suppresses humanity.

The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.

Above all, a director has to be a good captain.

abstract art is not the creation of another reality but the true vision of reality.

Movies are so hard to get made - every step of the way of making a movie has obstacles. If you don't have that passion, if you don't have that vision, if you don't believe it's a piece of art worth making, then you probably won't get it made - you won't have a chance for it to be something special.

Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes.

It is the specialist's task to talk about means, about centimeters. An artist's task is to talk about the goal, about kilometers, thousands of kilometers. The organizing role of art consists of infecting the reader, of arousing him with pathos or irony -- the cathode and anode in literature. But irony that is measured in centimeters is pathetic, and centimeter-sized pathos is ridiculous. No one can be carried away by it. To stir the reader, the artist must speak not of means but of ends, of the great goal toward which mankind is moving.

We are not trapped in what the science of management says we can do. We are capable of doing what the art of leadership says is possible.

Revolutionary art anticipates visionary physics. When the vision of the revolutionary artist, rooted in the Dionysian right hemisphere, combines with precognition, art will prophesy the future conception of reality.

Every time an artist dies, part of the vision of mankind passes with him.

I've never had a mentor personally of any kind. It feels like, generally, in the writing world or the art world, it's more of a thing in America, because you have writing programs, which we don't have. You have these amazing writers who are teachers. I never did a writing program so I never met a writer until I was published. I guess I can't really explain my compulsion for writing these kind of mentor characters.

Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible.

You’re directing a movie, but you are at the head of a ship of people, a whole fleet of people. And being able to manage that - being able to handle yourself as a director being a leader - that’s massively important.

Directing is such alchemy, it's so easy to fail. And I've seen people who are great at their jobs because everybody has a go. Editors, DPs, actors, craft services guy, everybody wants to try it out but it is such a diffuse but necessary set of skills that you never know which one this person might lack.

For Poesy alone can tell her dreams, With the fine spell of words alone can save Imagination from the sable charm And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say, ‘Thou art no Poet may’st not tell thy dreams?’ Since every man whose soul is not a clod Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved And been well nurtured in his mother tongue. Whether the dream now purpos’d to rehearse Be poet’s or fanatic’s will be known When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.

Directing is a constant test of your communicative powers. You're constantly trying to explain people your vision of what you want and steer these tiny little details into a cohesive thing.