Creative Authority Quotes

Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: 'How do you see the world, and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?'

Great design is not democratic; it comes from great designers. If the standard is lousy, then develop another standard.

Being the director - way fancier than 'just' being the writer. People call you 'talent.'

I prefer to believe it's my responsibility if a film of mine works or doesn't work.

You have total control of it, and when you're an actor, you're subject to production design and costumes and directors and studio choices and producer choices, but when you're writing it, you're creating your own little world in your head, peopled with your little characters. No one is in there monkeying with it, at least not at first - though they will. With this and the other projects I'm working on, it'll have to be given away, and it'll have to be someone else's property.

The director is the only person who knows what the film is about.

I always say I want creative control. A lot of people don't think about that. And that's what every artist should think of - being creative and not just a puppet.

The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.

You just have to say over and over again: 'I am a director.' Nobody gives it to you. Nobody anoints you.

I was in Paris, when Kanye [West] was doing his line and I stopped like, "Woah why are you doing womenswear and why do you think you can do it?" He was like, "Why? You don't know what you like to see women in?" I was like, "Yea but still women are so intricate."

Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.

When a director is also a writer, everyone on the production looks to him, knowing he gave birth to the idea. There's a different level of viability.

I'm worried a lot of our work day as artists is a producer's creation - not an artist's creation.

For me to be able to punch above my weight creatively, to actually take a stand for what I was doing, I had to take on everything. I had to be the person who says, 'I wrote it. I directed it.'

Writer/directors are, for me, the most inspiring people to work for because they are the person on set that knows the answer to all the questions. They have the most invested in the project because they've been with it from conception.

When I gave a direction to an actor in the show, I know their whole journey better than a guest director could know it.

As an artist, I have to be a leader of my fans, not, like, follow them. Because if I chose to follow them, you know, they could do it. You know, it's me who's doing it.

Sometimes you read a passage by a great writer, and you know what he says and how he says it will always be, for you, the only possible way it could be. Less often a painter will describe an event in a way that fits into your interpretation of that event so perfectly that it becomes the event itself.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.

What is absolutely true is that any good [Television] series has a specific voice. And I think that voice is almost exclusively the domain of the executive producer. . . . As a staff writer you're not being called upon to be the great creative person. You're sort of called upon to understand the characters and their voices and put them through certain paces.

There's always going to be a little bit of autobiographical content to everything. It's how you lend some authority to what you write - you give it that weight by drawing on your direct experiences and indirect experiences from people that you know well, or a little.

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

There's lots of different ways of writing stuff and lots of different mindsets to have, but I think when it's your own creation, it's more pleasurable because you have total control.

What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies....Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.