When I am painting I have a general notion as to what I am about. I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident.
I painted the Astor-Victoria sign seven times, and it's 395 feet wide and 58 feet high. I dropped a gallon of purple paint on Seventh Avenue and 47th Street from 15 stories up and didn't kill anybody. I dropped a brush at Columbus Circle. It fell on a guy's camel-hair coat.
To me, art almost always speaks more forcefully when it appears in an imperfect, accidental, and fragmentary way, somehow just signaling its presence, allowing one to feel it through the ineptitude of the interpretation. I prefer the Chopin that reaches me in the street from an open window to the Chopin served in great style from the concert stage.
Every film that I make is an accident.
The thing that interests me about photography, and why it's different from all other media, is that it's the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece.
All painting is an accident. But it's also not an accident, because one must select what part of the accident one chooses to preserve.
You want accuracy, but not representation. If you know how to make the figuration, it doesn't work. Anything you can make, you make by accident. In painting, you have to know what you do, not how, when you do it.
I used to take Sharpies and draw on my pillowcases, and then go to sleep on them and wake up with red marker from the drool all on my face.
With a movie you're creating from the beginning this particular work, let's not call it work of art, because very few movies are works of art, let's just call them bits of popular culture, whatever they are, sometimes very rarely by accident a movie becomes a work of art.
My thing is about following the accidental, more than trying to paint an accurate bowl of apples. I enjoy most following the paint. It leads me somewhere else. I think I enjoy just letting the magic unfold and letting the spirit of the paint tell me where we're going.
The cinema was certainly an art, but television can't be, because it is the museum of accidents. In other words, its art is to be the site where all accidents happen. But that's its only art.
Sometimes my mistakes turn into interesting music because I do things that aren't supposed to be done.
I'm usually way more pleased with the stuff that just kinda happens by accident and is no way a pop song. But sometimes the easiest thing for me to write is pop songs.
Painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down.
The director is simply the audience. His job is to preside over accidents.
I have always found that if, while creating an artwork, the artist constantly feels that some accident would occur if he is not careful, then it is a very significant moment and a significant work.
You have to go through the long, painful process of learning techniques to be able to recognize a "good accident" or a "bad accident."
What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.
Never, never do I set to work on a canvas in the state it comes in from the shop. I provoke accidents - a form, a splotch of color. Any accident is good enough. I let the matiere decide. Then I prepare a ground by, for example, wiping my brushes on the canvas. Letting fall some drops of turpentine on it would do just as well. If I want to make a drawing I crumple the sheet of paper or I wet it; the flowing water traces a line and this line may suggest what is to come next.
For me, writing Bridget's [Jones] stories is an instinctive, organic thing, which tends to happen more by accident than design.
My favorite parts of work as an actor and a director are those unplanned mistakes that do happen, because it's like catching lightning in a bottle. It's the best part of what we do.
All that I've done in my life thus far, all the poems and all the pictures, are not so much an intermingling of my life with art but a divine accident.
When you make art, you get really invested in it. When art happens by accident and you were just along for the ride? It's way more fun.
I like things that look like mistakes.
Probably the best nonsense poetry is produced gradually and accidentally, by communities rather than by individuals.
