Creative Bias Quotes

We are artists. We are all subjective people; we have a point of view. It doesn't mean we are right.

In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.

Sometimes as an artist you get wrapped up in what you are doing and you can't be objective.

I personally don't prefer acting and directing in something because I don't have the same objectivity.

Seeing any film after I have made it is difficult.

Never judge your own writing. You're not fit to do so.

I can't be objective about my work, because I am so involved that I can't see it as a product to be judged. I can't see it as an outsider.

The director is a Canadian, Jeff Stephenson, and any time I get a script that has any Canadian component, I'm always immediately much more interested.

Don't get seduced by your own stuff. Don't get high on your own supply. The hardest thing as a filmmaker is when you're watching a film that you've worked on for several years. You know every frame so intimately that holding lots of the objectivity of a new viewer who has just seen it for the first time is the hardest thing. Every aesthetic decision you make - and you make thousands of them every day, have to - in theory, must be done from you being a blank slate. You almost have to run a program, like a mind wipe, every time you watch the movie.

I looked around at what my colleagues were doing, and asked myself, 'What relationship has it with what's going on?' I found there was a great distortion of contemporary life. Photographers were interested only in certain things. A visually interesting place, people who were either very rich or very poor, and nostalgia.

Especially when you talk about the power of documentary filmmaking, you can't really have a slant; financially, you can't have a slant on the end goals.

So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement.

When you're doing a film, it's your film and it's, you know, your blood and - is in it along with everybody else's, and it's the greatest picture ever made when you're shooting it. It's only after the critics and then the public say you were wrong that you realize that you were wrong.

If I wrote a play with four characters every single one of them would talk like me regardless of age or sex.

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.

As a songwriter, it's kind of hard to listen to your own stuff with clarity.

One always likes one's latest book best. That's a natural feeling.

I can never read this book, just like I can never see a movie that I wrote a screenplay for. I can read it and see it physically, but I can't accurately judge it. I'm too close to it. If I read it ten times I'll have ten different reactions.

I think empathy's a terrible danger for a writer.

It's amazing how uncreative some people can be in this industry. They look at you and go, 'She's not right for the role'... but you've got to give someone a chance to show they're an actress. It's very frustrating.

Most actors really love it, that's what they want to do. They burn to do it. And so they'll read a script and think, that's an interesting part. And because they love acting, that blinds them to the fact that the rest of it is pretentious nonsense, which it very often is.

Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models.

I enjoy my own songs, but I can never love them in the way that I can love someone else's song.

As a writer, one is always a little blind to what one writes.

Being a writer-director can sometimes make you incredibly blinkered.