Kiki Smith Quotes

When I'm painting and drawing I only do people. Acting is obviously portraiture - and writing is as well.

Acting - you're taking someone else's visions and someone else's inspirations, and it's up to you to portray that to everyone watching the film.

I think that's why it's difficult for women when they watch TV and we see one version of a woman who is attached at the hip to a guy, and that's kind of her whole thing. You kind of go, 'I don't relate to this, I don't feel this.' You know? Maybe somebody does, but not everyone. That's the other thing about storytelling, is you can't represent everybody. You know, you can't seek to do that. You have to tell stories that you're interested in talking about and characters that intrigue you.

Being an actor, you are recognized for being somebody else, whereas these books are distilled from me.

Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.

I could come up with 50 stories that I am thinking about.

A true portrait should, today and a hundred years from today, the Testimony of how this person looked and what kind of human being he was.

I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them.

There's such a thing as being a little too perfect - a little too shiny. I know I prefer things that have room to breathe and give you a story, a world, in which you have the room to move around.

Variety of characters and themes bring out the best in me.

Of course I want the things I write to reflect well on me or anyone who might feel represented by me, but also, I'm not writing a guidebook on how to be or how my people should be seen. I'm telling very specific stories.

There are stories I wanted to tell, and they are not defined by what I look like.

... characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

Lena Dunham or Miranda July, those people are sort of thinking about their work in a slightly different way than I do, where their whole body is a seed of what they're creating. I can't imagine watching Miranda's movies with anybody else playing her role, she's so integral. But for me, it feels more like every story is really individual. If I thought of something else, or thought it should be my body representing it, I'd fold my body into it. But most of the time I'm writing to get something out of my body.

Don't write about what you know - write about what you're interested in. Don't write about yourself - you aren't as interesting as you think.

I think being an artist is having the courage to be original. Many great artists, including Picasso, have all been influenced by the great master paintings... And then finally, they leap, they take off... they become themselves. Then it looks like they just came out of nowhere. Just like 'Pow!'

I think references, where they fit organically, are great. It's great to do a show that's real and relatable, and so much of what is real, is using real things and instances that are specific. Specificity is the best tool you can have, as a writer.

I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.

I find it inspiring and I always think when I'm working on something new, whether it's a new kind of character or a new kind of story or new kind of camera, it gets my creative wheels spinning.

I think that there are a lot of great studio people but the fewer voices in my head when I'm getting out a draft, the better. I just get it out and then I'll listen to all manner of good ideas. And that's what happens, too, when I'm touring and doing a character on stage.

I think, in fact, there's a plus and a minus to knowing my prior work, Happiness and so forth. The plus is of course you can see how I play with the characters, the storylines, and the way things play off each other. And the minus is that it makes you a little bit more self-conscious, that you're not able to enter the movie as it exists and lives and breathes, because you're so busy making references, connections that you're not able to release yourself from and take the film on your own terms.

I think I started writing because no one had ever told me you can write about the things you know in a musical. They don't have to come from some far off place.

I like to think that I get better and better as a writer, but it seems pretty easy to me to slip on disguises of various people.

The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines; it offers magical metamorphoses to the one who opens the door, who passes on what was found there, and to those who hear what the storyteller brings. The faculty of wonder, like curiosity can make things happen; it is time for wishful thinking to have its due.

I think it's just the challenge. It's not that all my life I've wanted to do characters [in Marvel] , because I never particularly thought about it, but the challenge of saying, "How could they be done differently that may be more absorbing or more effective?"