Todd Haynes Quotes

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

I am not a librarian of my own work. It's a good thing not to be too involved with what you have done.

You can never correct your work well until you have forgotten it.

It is not hard to compose, but what is fabulously hard is to leave the superfluous notes under the table.

I used to play works in progress to people, but now I wait 'til it's finished, because you make excuses all the time: 'Well, there's gonna be an orchestra on it.' Rather than make excuses, wait 'til it's finished, and then they can say they don't like it.

For anybody who writes, very often, when you finish an album, you are so done with it. You've been listening in minutia, in super-focus.

If I've written five pages by hand, out of those five pages, one page might be worth saving. The rest is crap. I have to throw it away. It's like I need eight hours to do two hours' work.

Songwriting is like editing. You write down all this stuff - all this bad, stupid stuff - and then you have to get rid of everything except the very best.

People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.

A creation needs not only subjectivity, but also objectivity.

I believe that the reason why I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective. There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Every time I write something down I check it to see if it has that telltale glow, the glow that tells me there's something there. If it glows, it stays. Everything is either on or off.

I'm not as involved in every little thing as I used to be.

The thing I love about making movies is the peace of mind that I know I don't have to be perfect the first time. I can be perfect the second time or the third time.

You get so close to your own music that you can't see the beauty in it. I had to learn to let go. It's good to be less precious.

You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes.

There is but one art, to omit.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Crossing out is an art that is, perhaps, even more difficult than writing. It requires the sharpest eye to decide what is superfluous and must be removed. And it requires ruthlessness toward yourself -- the greatest ruthlessness and self-sacrifice. You must know how to sacrifice parts in the name of the whole.

Spontaneous is what you get after the seventeenth draft.

Sometimes I'm drawing onto a computer directly, sometimes I'm drawing on paper , so I can't really talk about drafts. It's just like having soft clay until it hardens. At least as much of the problem has to do with the decisions of what to represent, how to represent that, and how to reduce it down. The words in the balloons aren't particularly poetic necessarily, but it has the same problem as poetry, which is that one has to do great reduction. And if I tried to draw everything, you'd just have a tangled mess of a picture. The stripping down takes much longer than building up.

As a writer, you have to be willing to kill your darlings, and I'm a writer first. As a director, I've got no problem cutting the scenes.

Poet, never chase the dream. Laugh yourself and turn away. Mask your hunger, let it seem Small matter if he come or stay; But when he nestles in your hand at last, Close up your fingers tight and hold him fast.

Your life doesn't mean what you have or what you get. Its what your'e willing to give up.