Creative Confusion Quotes

The worst thing for an actor is a director that gets on your nerves and says things that actually confuse you.

Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion.

I've always been a bit of an orphan, because actors say, 'Well, he's more of a dancer.' And dancers say, 'No. He's really a singer.' And singers say, 'No. He's an actor.'

Blur' is about feeling lost, and on a personal level I would be lying if I didn't mention that this song, for me, was about feeling creatively and artistically lost in the city of all great opportunities, Los Angeles.

The other day someone left a piece of plasticine in my dressing room. I didn't know what to make of it.

When I started working as a writer-director, that's when he became Paul Thomas Anderson and I became Paul W.S. Anderson. Neither of us can write and direct an American movie under the name Paul Anderson.

I won't name any names, but I've done a couple of shows where once the pilot got picked up, the creators openly said, 'I have no idea where we're going.'

I guess when I look over my shoulder at other designers, I feel like people are so definitive. It's so clear to me what their aesthetic is, what they're projecting. And I look at my own work and I think, Who could ever decipher what the hell is going on?

Confusion seems to have become the vogue of European directors.

A rather ugly thing starts happening: the playwright finds himself knocked down for works that quite often are just as good or better than the works he's been praised for previously. And a lot of playwrights become confused by this and they start doing imitations of what they've done before, or they try to do something entirely different, in which case they get accused by the same critics of not doing what they used to do so well.

I am always wandering around in enigmas. There are young people who constantly come to tell me: you, too, are making Op Art. I haven't the slightest idea what that is, Op Art. I've been doing this work for thirty years now.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing.

I remember once seeing a guy in the grocery store who looked so much like my character the Archangel Gabriel, I wanted to go up to him and say, 'Hey, put that Red Bull down. You've already got wings.' My friend had to sternly remind me that he was a stranger and I did not, in fact, create him.

When I wrote my debut album I was around 17, I didn't really know what my sound was or who I was and what I wanted.

The error in the art-genre of Opera consists herein: a Means of expression (Music) has been made the end, while the End of expression (the Drama) has been made a means.

When we made that album with Gary Moore, I was still kind of searching for the right direction for myself. Although the music is quite good the direction was like a box of fireworks that caught light all at the same time.

You know, I was such a big Beatles fan, and when I'd buy a new album I'd invariably hate it the first time I heard it 'cause it was a mixture of absolute joy and absolute frustration. I couldn't grasp what they'd done, and I'd hate myself for that.

There are some good things and some fantastic ones in Auden's early attitude; if the reader calls it a muddle I shall acquiesce, with the remark that the later position might be considered a more rarefied muddle. But poets rather specialize in muddles and I have no doubt which of the muddles was better for Auden's poetry: one was fertile and usable, the other decidedly is not. Auden sometimes seems to be saying with Henry Clay, "I had rather be right than poetry"; but I am not sure, then, that he is either.

Artists are those people who sit at the intersection between the known and unknown, the rational and irrational, coming to terms with some of the confusing histories we, as artists, deal with.

I'm an artist and an engineer, which is, increasingly, a more common kind of hybrid. But I still fall into this weird crack where people don't seem to understand me.