Ann Maxwell Quotes

The downside of videos is that it will put my vision in front of other people, so they might not get the chance to create their own.

I feel, as an artist, I should be able to express who I am and the things I come from, and the places I want to also be.

Covers are always so fun to do, but there's nothing like telling your own story.

I like to tell my own story using my personality and my insight, the way I see things.

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

I care about being creative and expressing myself.

I say to my pupils, 'You can pitch me any thing you've got, but tell me why you're the only person who can write it in the world. Keep digging.'

You're creating ' it comes from the heart, the spirit, the soul. You're not manufacturing somebody else's plan, somebody else's blueprint, somebody else's idea that's not yours. So when you're creating, that's the beauty side of art, you know? It comes from within you.

You can only make the film that's in you.

The key to artistry is being able to say stuff the way other people can't.

Write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.

It's important not to base your ambition on anybody else's history, but to figure out how best to use your own particular personality and understanding of yourself to help tell other people's stories.

The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal.

Be the artist you were born to be.

Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.

I prefer writing originals.

You have to transmit to them what it's like being in the theater. And it has to come from somewhere inside you and not by being like what somebody did last year.

Writing is not a competitive sport. Everyone that writes has his or her own voice.

When you're an artist, all you're trying to do is self-express.

For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.

To create something you must be something.

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.

I don't want ever to be guilty of what my critics claim: doing formula without original elements.

No age is compelled to take its beauty from preceding epochs.