Creative Constraint Quotes

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

Once I had left 'Twin Peaks' and started doing other shows and other movies, I kept running into, 'No, no, we can't do it this way. This is the way it has to happen.' I'm like, 'No. I've already done it, and it worked, so I don't understand what you're saying.'

I've got a lot of artistic energy, but there's only so much of it, though. You don't want to spread yourself thin.

Written reports stifle creativity.

I hate to say it as a pejorative term, but I work for the Hollywood system for the most part.

No, I can't do rap music!

It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.

Bach and Beethoven, all of them, they had to write something to please the upper structure, those with money and power.

I don't see myself as an artist, as a writer. The sort of writing that I do, which is popular fiction, it's work. I have contracts to fulfil, and I have deadlines to meet.

All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

When I'm writing for other people, I have to play it safe.

There are just certain realities about our world and I just happen to be creative within it.

I have always wanted to play different kinds of stuff, but it's hard, first to find good material, and then to change people's perception of you so they'll let you do it. I mean, I would really like to play a poet, but once they get this notion of you as a street guy, it's hard to change that.

Listen to really old blues guys and how they weren't allowed to sing about what they meant; they alluded to things. I find that style amusing, and I think it's a little harder to write.

Why has Scandinavia been producing such good thrillers? Maybe because their filmmakers can't afford millions for CGI and must rely on cheaper elements like, you know, stories and characters.

Hip-hop is limiting itself and that also goes for editorially. Magazines and websites are the gatekeepers of what people think hip-hop is, but they actually end up limiting what hip-hop can be.

My first two records are so simply constructed. The reason isn't because I wanted to make simple music. It's because I don't really have the chops.

If you can even manage to tell exactly what a song is about, all you do is put that song in a box forever, and it loses its evocative power.

As a writer and a director, I simply don't have the time I need to write and prep the movie I would have wanted to make because of the fixed and tight production schedule.

I started at the very highest level so the upper end is something I know very well. I know it instinctively. But all the years I was designing, it frustrated me that I could reach so few women.

I wanted to sing songs that my voice was comfortable with.

When I was on 'One Life to Live,' I always wanted to delve into my character, Layla, to find out why she was the black sheep of the family. I so wanted to have some edge. I have no idea why there was a reluctance to do that or why we so rarely see it.

I like to draw from experiences in my past, but that alone is quite hard and complicated, because I don't want to say anything incriminating or too offensive, but I want to give people an insight into my life and how it was.

Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn't be able to write about.

Novelists get to say plenty in their massive tomes; rock singers only get four-minute songs with two verses and a chorus' worth of lyrics, and so there's a real pleasure in accessing the intelligence behind the music, even if it doesn't qualify as 'great literature.'