Creative Conflict Quotes

The history of creation is but a succession of battles between amateurs of genius-inspired heretics- and orthodox professionals.

You say to a brick, 'What do you want, brick?' And brick says to you, 'I like an arch.' And you say to brick, 'Look, I want one, too, but arches are expensive and I can use a concrete lintel.' And then you say: 'What do you think of that, brick?' Brick says: 'I like an arch.'

Also, differences of opinion can be creatively stimulating as well as frustrating.

I feel guilty because I want to act more than I want to write songs. I'm a person who likes to transition; I like to grow.

Theo van Doesburg wanted to teach in the Bauhaus in 1922. I refused, however, to appoint him since I considered him to be too aggressive and too rigidly theoretical: he would have wrought havoc in the Bauhaus through his fanatic attitude, which ran counter to my own broader approach.

You know why Foo Fighters have been a band for 20 years? Because I've never really told anybody what I think of them. The last thing you ever want to do is go to therapy with your band.

Knowing record labels and knowing the kinds of things they would object to-they just object to everything that's interesting.

It is (to describe it figuratively) as if an author were to make a slip of the pen, and as if this clerical error became conscious of being such. Perhaps this was no error but in a far higher sense was an essential part of the whole exposition. It is, then, as if this clerical error were to revolt against the author, out of hatred for him, were to forbid him to correct it, and were to say, "No, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against thee, that thou art a very poor writer."

The relationship between talent and management is uneasy, at best.

In the acting game, you spend a long time fighting against what the director perceives you to be. And half the time the directors don't know.

When I was younger, I wondered if it was possible to be a good person and a writer.

Pain s the truth of art. Art is not a hobby or a pastime. It is the result of an internal battle royal, one between the quest for safety and the desire to matter.

I know now that I began writing in a country where the word 'woman' and the word 'poet' were almost magnetically opposed. One word was used to invoke collective nurture, the other to sketch out self-reflective individualism. Both states were necessary - that much the culture conceded - but they were oil and water and could not be mixed.

I would love to make lighter entertainments that have you sort of hopping and skipping and jumping out of the theater, but part of me just doesn't know how much I believe in that, as much as I want to.

Chet loved artists. He did. But he was caught up in the system. He had two hats. He had to have 'em because he did two things: he was an artist, and he was an executive.

Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is a fight to the finish between black charcoal and white paper.

The primary thing I should do, apart from being a good husband, brother, son, and friend, is to be a citizen activist. But I'm afraid it takes away from the writing. Not that anything depends on whether I put an essay in 'The Nation' or not. But you want to participate.

You're torn between wanting to fill in all the spaces and knowing that's really going to screw up the screenplay. And yet, how are you going to communicate it to people who really don't understand the process?

All these non-singing, non-dancing, wish-I-had-me-some-clothes fools who tell me my albums suck. Why should I pay any attention to them?

You make one solo album, and some people swear you're about to leave the band or there are creative differences.

Business logic and musical logic are utterly incompatible.

When you're in a band, it's like everyone's the CEO, and anyone could destroy it at any moment.

But I now think what I was doing, in a completely unconscious way, was getting off the turf where my husband and I might be rivals. We were both working in fiction... so I look back and I see that I consciously vacated the contested ground.

Being a producer, I deal with a lot of different directors, and some of them would drive me insane with all the different histrionics, and the mystique that they carry.

Life is art's rival and vice versa.