Christopher Nolan Quotes

After touring with David Bowie last year, I was inspired to look at what I wanted to do as an artist, and I realized I wanted to go back to the music I fell in love with when I was eight years old.

I don't want real life necessarily to be seen only as a context to heighten the deepness my work.

When I was a young artist, and I would go look at other artists' career retrospectives, and I was often disappointed with the lack of story line... What was missing to me was the story of where the artist came from and how they got to where they were.

As someone whose music is connected to his personal growth, I feel an obligation to follow this muse wherever it leads.

I don't tend to say it's time for one of this or that genre. Things flow to you in a strange way, and why you bump into a certain kind of thing in one moment is...it's hard to explain.

I think anything that affects me in my personal life is going to help me be a better artist on stage.

The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is the creator. Rather he is a reciever. What seems like creaton is the act of giving form to what he has recieved.

I love my old paintings as postulates as fresh starting points but I have to destroy them. I have to make a new manifesto.

You think you've made something really great, but there's a reason why it's not resonating the way some previous work did. But it's not that easy to just replicate. Some people think, "Oh, just go do that thing you used to do before." But it just doesn't work like that. It's a lot more mysterious or slippery.

The idea is that what an artist lives through should broaden his notion of what it is possible for a human being to live through, and that new understanding should then get into and expand the work.

[Liv Corfixen] very much part of my life in that she's everything in my life and we found a way to use each other much more on a creative level as well. She was kind of the idea for this movie so I wanted to acknowledge that. She gave me the original idea to make the film.

I'm a little nervous. Definitely. Especially coming from an album like Biophilia, which was about the universe. This is more of a traditional singer/songwriter thing. When I started writing, I fought against it. I thought it was way too boring and predictable. But most of the time, it just happens; there's nothing you can do. You have to let it be what it is.

One never knows what one is going to do. One starts a painting and then it becomes something quite different.

I noticed with older songs that I perform that I'm coming from a different place with them now...it mutates the vibe and even the meaning of the same words when you have a different spirit, if the person singing is different. I like that, to be able to sing an emotionally wrought song from a more centered place, or to sing an eager, youthful song from a more experienced place. It kind of colors the songs differently, and it keeps them fresh.

In order to produce something new, you have to return to the original source, to the childhood of mankind.

I wanted to be a songwriter.I didn't so much want to be a performer.I more grew into that just from being a songwriter.

I always find with my stories that the way they start is that I just get so interested in a person that I'm compelled to go back to them over and over until I learn more and more about them, without even quite thinking it's material for a book.

It was all in my head and now all I had to do was figure out a way to get it down on paper.

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.

I tend to avoid writing music about initial reactions to situations, like frustration or anger. I’d rather wait till I go through the problem, and write about the learning that took place.

I wake up in the morning, or the middle of the night when an idea comes through. My songwriting style, basically I just write down information given to me from the muse and how that works for songwriters. Record the muse and the muse delivers.

No poem was ever written by a drinker of water.

Sometimes even hearing a bad idea is a great way to get to a good idea.

I believe framing reality is one of the only ways we can ever be sure it actually exists. In that regard, I feel as though I'm still learning who I am as an artist.

I'm an artist first and foremost. So things are gonna go up and down and sideways and whichever way all through life.