He had been standing still; for an artist, one of the more painful forms of death.
I became paralyzed as an artist with writer's block.
Essentially I feel like all of that pressure when you're making the first of a franchise of [movies based on] books that mean so much to people that has so much attention on it, it can be quite paralyzing I think. I think a lot of that creeped in the first time around and it maybe affects the work.
The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.
There has been in our time a lack of reliance on language and a lack of experimentation which are frightening to anyone who sees them as symptoms. We know the phenomenon of stage-fright: it holds the player shivering, incapable of speech or action. Perhaps there is an audience-fright which the play can feel, which leaves him with these incapacities.
I spent my life attacking everything because I was too afraid to risk creating anything.
Once you land on who you think the character is and what his conflicts are, you have to let that lead you. You have to throw all that other stuff away and not be worried about this epic responsibility, or it will just crush and paralyze you.
Life too near paralyses art.
In my view, the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays.
As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.
