Artistic Uncertainty Quotes

I've always operated with a great deal of self-doubt. Every time I start a new book it's like, well, this one will destroy the career and I have to overcome that feeling especially in the first hundred pages of the book.

I don't think anyone would want to come to my gallery show.

I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for.

When I do comedy, my brain sort of locks up in the infinite possibilities. That's where I get sort of lost. I think, "Oh, there are six other jokes that we could say here!" I feel more at home with drama.

I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.

I know some things when I start. I know, let's say, that the play is going to be a 1970s or a 1930s play, and it's going to be about a piano, but that's it. I slowly discover who the characters are as I go along.

When I listen to a Coldplay record, you're gonna hear an indie band, and you know that's what you're gonna get from Coldplay. With myself, I'm not sure it's the same.

I never know when a record is finished until it's almost finished.

There's this existential argument that comes in, at some point, when you're over-thinking the songwriting process. There's no guarantee that the more time you spend or the more you concentrate on certain aspects that that's going to produce a better result, especially in the arts.

'Float On' was a fine song, but I was still writing the lyrics on the last day we were working on it and deciding if it was something we wanted to put on the record.

Acting is a strange business; one day it's there, and the next day nowhere to be seen.

When you work with somebody else, you automatically get a mixed voice. You hope it will benefit the story. But you don't know what the result will be.

I'm never sure if I'll ever write another song, what the song will be about and if what initially sparked the beginning of a song might complete it.

As a working actor, all I want to do is work. That's it. It's terrifying when you don't work. It's very hard when you don't work. There have been times when I've been out of work for like six months. I feel theatre to me is like manna.

You don't really know what you're going to get until you're actually in Abbey Road. That's where I did all the music, in The Beatles' place.

I think that's kind of the perfect mix, where you do something that you're not sure about, you feel like you're taking a risk, and then you turn around and look at the artists that you're collaborating with and you can read the expression on their face if they like it or they hate it.

I am certain about what I will never do - but not about what my art will render.

I wish I could have more faith in my own music. Unfortunately, I don't.

There is no screenplay-writing recipe that guarantees your cake will rise.

One of my problems is I'm not really sure if I slot into rock or not. I've always tried to combine world music, folk, jazz, blues and rock, and have done since Traffic.

Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.

Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest.

I still do not know where the notes will come from when I accept a commission for a new work.

I'll look back and I'd be better to answer that in about three months from now. Or when the movie comes out and I see it. I don't even know what it is yet. I've still been in the middle of it.

There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.