Creative Constraints Quotes

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

Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they're all we have.

When looking at any significant work of art, remember that a more significant one probably has had to be sacrificed.

If you have total freedom to design, you won't get anything interesting. So I give myself restraints in order to kind of push myself through, to create something new. It's the torture that I give myself, the pain and the struggle that I go through.

If a poet would influence politics he must join a party, and then he is lost as a poet: goodbye to his free spirit and his open mind.

There is a danger in becoming an icon, as people can see you as remote and untouchable, and they are less willing to tolerate you doing things that don't fit with their preconceived idea of you. Iconic status can be like a pair of handcuffs, especially if, like me, you wish to continually stretch yourself creatively, as Warhol did.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

What happens with artists, or people who start off doing things for the right reasons, is that you slowly start to paint yourself into a corner by doing what people outside of the creative world are asking you to do, and I think that's antithetical to being an artist.

In the TV business, you've got to write fast, and someone will tell you, 'Can you rewrite this episode before... 6 P.M.?' So that's when you rewrite it. You can't wait for the muse to show up.

Even the most deft pen is a clumsy tool.

The arts have a development which comes not only from the individual but also from a whole acquired force, the civilization which precedes us. One cannot do just anything. A talented artist cannot do whatever he pleases. If he only used his gifts, he would not exist. We are not the masters of what we produce. It is imposed on us.

Times change; Hollywood is not the same as it was when I first entered the business. It felt to me like it was starting to narrow down and centralize itself around what would... make money.

Technology is a major tool in exploring and challenging your creativity, but it can also overtake your creativity... My mind goes very fast, and I can see all kinds of images that would be spectacular on the screen. But they would cost so much money, and would they really make the story that much better?

I've had big record label presidents look me in the face and say, 'Your music sucks, you don't know who you are, your music is all over the place, and we don't know how to market this stuff. Pick a lane and come back to us.'

Everything you've ever read of mine is first-draft. This is one of the peculiarities of the comics field. By the time you're working on chapter three of your masterwork, chapter one is already in print. You can't go back and suddenly decide to make this character a woman, or have this one fall out of a window.

There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art.

If one just tried to invent a universe on one's own, it would probably end up being a much less colorful and interesting universe than the one that we live in.

More than often, what you see, or what we've been able to recreate, has usually been a tampered-with version of what I have in my head, because the original idea has always been bigger. Every time I am in the mode of creating a show, there's always some level of gravity that comes in play, either of a monetary sort, or there's a space issue.

At a major label you can start to feel that you're working for them, and that any work you do, you're never going to see any benefit.

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.

The human mind cannot go beyond the gift of God, the Holy Ghost. To suppose that art can go beyond the finest specimens of art that are now in the world is not knowing what art is; it is being blind to the gifts of the spirit.

Even on a $100 million film, people will complain that they haven't got enough money and enough time, so that's always going to be an element in filmmaking.

If you are in a band or in any situation with other people there are obviously brilliant aspects to it, but there are also things that you start finding yourself tied to.

I did a film that I shot in 24 hours that was self-financed for $5,000. It was a feature called Looking For Jimmy that I shot with a bunch of friends. I spent eight months editing because we had 24 hours of footage that made no sense and I learned a lot about directing while editing that film.