Woody Allen stayed so good because he never left New York. Howard Stern stayed so good because he never left New York - Mel Brooks when he just got out of New York was doing 'Blazing Saddles;' when he left New York he started doing stuff like 'Robin Hood Men In Tights' - he was in L.A. too long. He lost the edge.
I always try to be alert to the potential for repetition, for a decaying orbit with regard to my use of technique, etc.
On any given day, I'm likely to be working at home, hunched over this keyboard, typing Great Thoughts and Beautiful Sentences - or so they seem at the time, like those beautifully flecked and iridescent stones one finds at the seashore that gradually dry into dull gray pebbles.
We sometimes have a flash of understanding that amounts to the insight of genius, and yet it slowly withers, even in our hands - like a flower. The form remains, but the colours and the fragrance are gone.
The thing I worry about is, what happens when your talent flees? Because you see that with writers sometimes: they start writing these awful books. And there's something sort of horrifying about it.
A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.
The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.
The term 'genre' eventually becomes pejorative because you're referring to something that's so codified and ritualised that it ceases to have the power and meaning it had when it first started.
I find that when you read a script, or rewrite something, or look at something that's been gone over, you can tell, like rings on a tree, by how bad it is, how long it's been in development.
The sermon which I write inquisitive of truth is good a year after, but that which is written because a sermon must be writ is musty the next day.
Jazz is so incestuous that it's starting to kill itself.
Hush, little bright line, don’t you cry You’ll be a cliché by and by.
Hardening of the categories causes art disease.
When Sir Joshua Reynolds died All Nature was degraded; The King dropped a tear in the Queen's ear, And all his pictures faded.
When I came up, it was all about originality and collective research. There is an awful lot of imitation going on now.
As artists get wealthier and more famous, often their work gets worse... I'm fascinated by the decline of artists. I suspect I'll be in decline myself. It's a fact of life.
In any evolutionary process, even in the arts, the search for novelty becomes corrupting.
In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.
If critics were harder on the musicians that they love, there would be better songs. But as they grow older and they lose their talent, critics refuse to let them know that and protect them, and they get to the point where they put out music that just isn't up to the levels where they've already been.
There is no trajectory so pathetic as that of an artist in decline.
But such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, [her] sincerity became less necessary.
Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. it must be allowed to decay.
For poetry, he's past his prime, He takes an hour to find a rhyme; His fire is out, his wit decayed, His fancy sunk, his muse a jade. I'd have him throw away his pen, But there's no talking to some men.
All progress in literary style lies in the heroic resolve to cast aside accretions and exuberances, all the conventions of a past age that were once beautiful because alive and are now false because dead.
