Joshua Oppenheimer Quotes

For me, making films is about trying to work something out by myself in quite a lonely way. I find the whole thing very lonely really.

My films are always a struggle to make and will remain so.

To be a lone filmmaker thousands of miles from home with nobody believing in me, that seems romantic.

Largely this is a class thing - writers tend to be cosseted little middle-class kiddies who think that the world owes them a royalty cheque. But just doing it - being in your room for years on end, locked in your head, alone with invented ghosts - it weakens and softens the body. And I know I can't just live in my head.

Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

We in China are convinced that it is the better half of wisdom not to accept failure ignominiously, but to risk it gloriously.

I just really remember the feeling of being a younger comedian who was kind of an outlier for being experimental and weird and how that could feel lonely or hopeless.

Painting is a lonely, mostly solitary act.

When I see a film, I'll remember that there was a time when it wasn't working, and there was some pain and angst in order to get it to work.

I know I am lucky to be alive - but I will race again.

It is the swimmer who first leaps into the frozen stream who is cut sharpest by the ice; those who follow him find it broken, and the last find it gone. It is the men or women who first tread down the path which the bulk of humanity will ultimately follow, who must find themselves at last in solitudes where the silence is deadly.

The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure.

Simply to endure is to triumph.

Even against the greatest of odds, there is something in the human spirit - a magic blend of skill, faith, and valor - that can lift men from certain defeat to incredible victory.

It's lonely at the top - if you don't like that, then you don't start a company.

I want to go to my grave a free man. Surviving against giants-that's victory.

The only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.

I've never been satisfied or even pleased with a film that I've done. I make them, I'm finished, I've never looked at one after. I don't like them because there's a big gap between what you conceive in your mind when you're writing and you don't have to meet the test of reality. You're home, you write and it's funny and beautiful and romantic and dramatic, and then you have to show up on a cold morning, and you don't have enough of this and this goes wrong and you make the wrong choice on something and you screwed up and you can't go back.

Real courage embraces the twin realities of current difficulty and ultimate triumph.

I had an idea and I wanted just to make it work. And I am never, ever secure on the set that what I am doing is going to translate to the screen. It never changes.

I don't know about writing. It's quite lonely. You have to have a lot of patience with yourself.

A lifetime of glory is worth a moment of pain. Louie thought: Let go.

Do not feel lonely on the road of righteousness Because of the fewness of the walkers on it.

I feel I must live alone, alone, alone - with artists only to touch the door. Every artist cuts off his ear and nails it on the outside of the door for the others to shout into.