Stephen Colbert Quotes

When you start a script you aim to hit a note you know you want to end in general.

My goal with everything that I do is to present things in a way that I would want to see if I was in the audience or buying the record.

I listen to a lot of music. But I definitely haven't looked at an artist and like thought I want to have a song like this.

Everything that you want to create is already there. Your job is to connect yourself to it.

I don't want to deal with the underneath while I'm, you know, while I'm making it or while I'm writing it or when I'm making it. Because again, I don't want to hit these nails on the head too strongly.

If art doesn't require an audience, can an intimate conversation be a work of art? Can a thought be a work of art? Maybe. I don't know. These questions are completely hypothetical for me, because I love interacting with audiences. I want my poems to be heard.

The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.

If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality.

I don't like to write music by myself anymore. It's boring. I want the jamming, the push and pull, and the excitement that comes with it.

In the music industry, it's pretty easy to make an album just because you want to keep going, like, 'This is the formula.' But the formula is your life. You have to live your life and you have to live it well - that's the formula.

I want to talk about things that are tangible and real to me, but I also want to do them in a way that's poetic and artistic.

One must not imitate what one wants to create.

I get a lot of work done in my dreams and I don't want to take anybody else's work with me.

If you want to write, then write; if you don't want to write, then don't write. I fell into the former category, and I just made the decision that I'd keep on because I liked it and might someday do something decent.

I made a point to not read too far ahead with the first six or seven episodes of any show. I would read the outlines, but I didn't really want to read scripts too far in advance because I didn't really want to get ahead of myself, at all. To be honest, I don't have the time to come up with theories.

If we want a better original idea, we must generate our own before we screen others' suggestions.

I want painting to be difficult to do.

I just want to try - on a daily basis keep trying - to make music that I really love.

I write about what I want to write about, and so the film comes out as a very personal expression even if its subject matter is totally prefabricated.

Listen, Patch, I don’t want to be rude, but—” “Sure you do.” “Well, you started it!” Lovely. Very mature.

When we really want to master anything, we must enter into the spirit of it. And when we enter into the spirit of something, what we're really doing is reproducing in ourselves the same qualities that whoever created it had.

When we approached the project, the very first thing we did was take each character and say, "Okay, where would this character be?" We didn't want them to be caricatures of themselves. We wanted them to live and breathe, and grow with the audience and with us.

Normally, I tend to be a very binary filmmaker. You give me a problem and a destination and I say, "All right. If you want to get from here to here, there's a series of if/then's that will get you there. And if you have other stuff you want to do along the way, I'll give you all the if/then's that are caused by that."

I usually have an idea that I want to build on and let the music take me where I wanna go.

We do not write what we know; we write what we want to find out.