Jason Schwartzman Quotes

Much of the excitement we get out of our work is that we don't really know what we are doing.

Risk is an essential part of progress.

The creative process is also the most terrifying part because you don't know exactly what's going to happen or where it is going to lead. You don't know what new dangers and challenges you'll find. It takes an enormous amount of internal security to begin with the spirit of adventure, discovery, and creativity. Without doubt, you have to leave the comfort zone of base camp and confront an entirely new and unknown wilderness.

I want to be scared. I want to keep taking insane risks. I want to be scared because you're going to grow through that whether you want to or not. I don't want to play the same guy. I want to keep throwing curveballs to you guys and keep telling stories.

I always try to keep that feeling of being on the edge. I'm afraid of knowing too well and seeming mechanical.

Fear of the unknown is a great creative partner.

I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment.

If we knew what we were doing we wouldn't be entertaining.

With innovation, there is always risk.

I've always been quite careful about what I wanted to do. I've just never wanted to revisit old ground or do something that's easy. I want to do something that I would look at and go, "I don't know what to do!" The most exciting thing is when you're a bit scared, so I'm looking to find something that's really terrifying.

Life is about trying things to see if they work.

I've never been averse to a little risk - after all, writing without risk is not really writing at all. Sometimes one has to just let fly with a high concept piece and see where the pieces fall. As it generally turns out, the central story is familiar, but just with different rules of engagement.

There is no security in following the call to adventure.

To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer.

Adventures are only interesting once you've lived to see the end of them. Before that, they are nothing but fear, and being too cold or too hot or too wet or too hungry, and getting hurt.

There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.

If your work isn't exciting, doesn't stir the emotions, where's the challenge? Where's the progress if you always play it safe?

I feel like every time I take on a movie, it's important that the possibility of failure exists, and of the unknown, because it's a challenge to do something I haven't done before and something I have to try to work out.

What is the purpose of being human and alive without doing new things?

Any creative process is about being in a territory which isn't secure, isn't necessarily familiar, and isn't convenient in any sort of way. And that's the excitement of it.

The coolest things in life are things that you have not done before. That's the key to life: new things always.

I'm normally drawn to something I haven't done and seen before.

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.

If I wasn't doing this kind of exploration, I'd like to be doing some other kind of exploration. It might be more risky, or less risky, but, in the business of exploration, risk is part of the territory.

You've gotta dive into the abyss if you wanna get anything good. Every record, you've gotta go down in the abyss and hope that you come out of it alive.