Unfortunately, I am very aware of editing and I look at the monitor too much. Sometimes the monitor can become your worst enemy because you can, consciously or unconsciously, start editing yourself.
When you're trying to come up with an idea for a movie it's actually the hardest part - the germ of the idea. Inevitably you think of something that would be great and then discover that it was on an episode of The Simpsons.
I've cried multiple times after posting a video. So much work goes into each video that I don't know how I'm still alive.
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
perfectionism is the enemy of art. Since art is essentially divine play, not dogged work, it often happens that as one becomes more professionally driven one also becomes less capriciously playful.
I've got at least two major project ideas that I've been chewing on for several years in my head and I've been trying to resist them both. But I have learned over the years that when they don't go away and they're still in there, you probably have to resign yourself to the fact that you're going to do something about them.
I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.
If you are going to write, say, fantasy - stop reading fantasy. You've already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you're going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.
I've been wanting to do a book about baseball for the longest time, and nobody will let me do it. It's the one thing from America I really miss.
My father's father wrote for a Philadelphia newspaper and aspired to be a playwright. We had in our house a couple of crazy unproduced plays that he had written. For the one creative writing class I took in my life, I didn't do any writing - I decided that I would plagiarize his terrible play to not fail the class.
Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.
It got to the point where I couldn't afford to borrow any more money to lose. Know what I mean? That was just before 'Frampton,' my fourth album. As we were recording it, I was very down and depressed.
I'm squandering invaluable gray matter by censoring myself.
I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.
It took me a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That academic mind-set - which was kind of shallow in my case anyway - had begun to fade.
How could I make a little book, when I have seen enough to make a dozen large books?
If I don't see a music video to it while writing it, I just scrap it immediately. It's very visual.
I didn't write songs for a very long time.
If someone said, 'Sit down and write a 'Community' episode,' I would be panicked.
It's the business of movies, it's the fights that go along with the level of budget, and more than anything, it's the creative constipation of having to live with one idea for two or three years. It's just not that fun.
If you worry too much about anything, you end up making bad movies.
When you are creating to the magnitude that I try to create, your brain is like a computer, and you need to refresh.
Barton Fink is just too self-important as an artist to get much sympathy.
I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing.
