Creative Discouragement Quotes

All kids draw and write poetry and everything, and some of us last until we're about eighteen, but most drop off at about twelve when some guy comes up and says, "You're no good." That's all we get told all our lives. "You haven't got the ability. You're a cobbler." It happened to all of us, but if somebody had told me all my life, "Yeah, you're a great artist," I would have been a more secure person.

When I'm working on something, if I went to an exhibition of an artist I respect, then I usually come home quite depressed and look at what I'm doing and throw it all away and start again.

Sure, I have advice for people starting to write. Don't. I don't need the competition.

My first ten years in Hollywood were really tough. I'd be coaching friends who came to me for acting advice, and then they'd make it before I did. I'd still be helping them while they were on movie sets and I had four lines on a TV show.

Every time I wrote fiction, I was discouraged, and every time I wrote nonfiction, I was encouraged.

The creative act is also in a small way a suffering act - we start out with our ego, this hope of making this thing whatever it be, but so often it eludes us and it collapses and we kind of regress into this mental suffering, we can't find what we're looking for.

A large part of the creative process is tolerating the gap between the glorious image you had in your mind and the sad thing you've just made.

After 'Ra.One,' 'Cash,' 'Tum Bin 2' did not work, I almost lost my confidence as a director.

So you have to keep waiting and then they give you the script and it's terrible. Then you have to go to the rewrite and they're very upset because you didn't like it. I went through that for seven years.

I can only speak for myself, but public school did nothing for me musically. I got the impression a musical career was frowned upon. But in the arts, resistance can often be the strongest inspiration.

People have these incredible expectations. So instead of being inspired by, say, Joni Mitchell's music, I look at it and say to myself, 'I'm going to quit - why would I think of writing or performing after listening to that?'

In Western society, and particularly in American society, imagination is stulified from infancy. The imaginative child is discouraged and upbraided. He is told that the process is mere dreaming, that it wastes time and leads nowhere. It is said to be "impractical." As the child grows and its imagination inevitably leads it to express unconventional ideas and to try new behavior, it is chided and even viciously punished for such signs of unorthodoxy.

It is a little bit demoralizing to work a show, and you just try so many times to get something, and the creator just keeps saying, 'No, not that.' Then they just instantly come up with something.

You were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid - things you liked - on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don’t do music. You’re not going to be a musician. Don’t do art. You're not going to be an artist - benign advice, now profoundly mistaken.

I used to encourage everyone I knew to make art; I don't do that so much anymore.