Creative Courage Quotes

I was taught that to create anything you had to believe in failure, simply because you had to be prepared to go through an idea without any fear. Failure, you learned, as I did in art school, to be a wonderful thing. It allowed you to get up in the morning and take the pillow off your head.

Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

Each time I undertake to paint a picture I have a sensation of leaping into space. I never know whether I shall fall on my feet. It is only later that I begin to estimate more exactly the the effect of my work.

I think being an artist is having the courage to be original. Many great artists, including Picasso, have all been influenced by the great master paintings... And then finally, they leap, they take off... they become themselves. Then it looks like they just came out of nowhere. Just like 'Pow!'

Whatever art form you're working in, it's crucial to see it clearly, to feel it clearly, and not to worry about the results, or how someone else will see it.

To be honest, I probably wouldn't have gone to Hollywood if I hadn't been offered 'Ugly Betty' because I was a wee bit feart. But you have to make yourself frightened. That's what keeps you alive.

I try and reduce myself to an almost blank slate and hope to God that I am creative.

If you only believe that you're an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out, I would say that's quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.

You need fear to create, to live.

When somebody who makes movies for a living - either as an actor, writer, producer or director - lives to be a certain age, you have to admire them. It is an act of courage to make a film - a courage for which you are not prepared in the rest of life. It is very hard and very destructive. But we do it because we love it.

Anyone who does anything creative is always gonna want to change.

An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.

I've never been much of a craftsman, in an educated way. But I think just the experience of writing makes the avenues I follow a little more efficient in some ways. At the same time, when you're young, you're a little more fearless, and there's less of an internal critic.

All art is an intensely vulnerable gesture, and it is made with no small amounts of risk, and fear. So, I have plenty of sympathy for self-defense mechanisms, especially among artists.

I would make a film with a political point of view if I agreed with it, and even, perhaps, if I didn't.

I've heard some people say that I'm selling out, but I'm not. If I hadn't done 'Black Radio', and just kept on doing just piano trio stuff, I wouldn't be honest with myself; I'd be doing it to please other people. That would be selling out.

Hindsight is the most dangerous thing imaginable for me. I imagine that's the case for most filmmakers. And I would love to be a filmmaker who was an exception to that rule, but I'm certainly not.

While I hope that people like my work, I don't think an artist should be afraid of ­people not liking his work.

So with the young African artists. What they have to learn from tribal art is not how to copy the traditional forms, but the confidence that comes from knowing that somewhere inside them there should be the vitality which enabled their fathers to produce these extraordinary and exciting forms.

The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

Anyone in the arts has had an experience of seeing someone who they related to doing something and thinking, 'I could do that.' If you have one generation where you force its hand a bit, then the next one fills in the gaps, because it's seen an example of what can be done.

I'm perpetually interested by living in places as an artist confronting challenges I've never confronted before and approaching them with as much craft and humanity as I can.

A lot of very, very big stars were going down and not being seen or heard from again. Kirk took a huge chance in putting a blacklisted writer's name on the screen and somehow or other, he survived it, like he survives everything.

I think writers rush in where everybody is very frightened to tread.