Creative Limitation Quotes

I would be a terrible director, I could never write anything. One of my great strengths is that I know all of my weaknesses.

I can't give you 150 takes. I can't even give you 30 different ways of doing it! I don't have the talent or the range for it.

I'm crazy about 'Breaking Bad,' but I wouldn't know how to write an episode of it.

When The Who first started, we were playing blues, and I dug the blues and I knew what I was supposed to be playing, but I couldn't play it. I couldn't get it out. I knew what I had to play; it was in my head. I could hear the notes in my head, but I couldn't get them out on the guitar.

I would like to be a great artist. I would quit pitching if I could paint like Monet or Rousseau. But I can't. What I can do is pitch, and I can do that very well.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

My work as an actor is limited by the voice of the director and the writing.

I am incapable of directing a film like 'Agneenath.' I can do only what I am good at, so I would have been the worst choice to direct it. It has aggression, action and an inherent violence in it - things I am not capable of directing in my films.

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.

Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write.

Much of left-wing artistic activity … has been restricted, narrowed … sometimes made sterile … [This flows] from a central source … That source is the vulgarization of the theory of art which lies behind left-wing thinking: namely, “art is a weapon.” I have come to believe that the accepted understanding of art as a weapon is not a useful guide, but a straightjacket.

I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.

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 would do a musical, but I can't sing.

But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

I picked up the bass kind of postpunk-style. There's a real art to not learning how to play an instrument and being able to still play it.

As an actor and a writer, the anxiety about doing TV is that you start to feel like you get married to one tone or one kind of idea and you feel like you want to be able to express a lot of different things.

I didn't watch 'The A-Team' movie. I'm an artist. You can't re-paint a Rembrandt. You can't duplicate that; I don't care who you get.

Any platform that you use to tell stories helps you regardless of the medium regardless if they are bedtime stories that you tell your children or comics or film. Specifically what makes comics unique is that they are a storytelling device that forces you to think both visually and economically. Some might say you are limited by your imagination, but that is not true because someone has to draw it.

In a sense I'm glad that I've never learned how to paint.

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.

I don't think I ever wrote a song. I can write a lot of jokes, but when I try to write lyrics they're the most direct, non-figurative words, like, 'I like you, I like you,'... and that's it, for the whole song. People would go, 'Ooh, this guy's Dylan or something.' It gives me a lot more respect for songwriters, actually.

The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don't know what to do with it.

As an artist, program directors always want to put you in a little box.

Animation can be a full spectrum of different storytelling techniques and different genres. I think it's sad that there is only one audience that the studios are aiming for and that's the kid audience. It's really tragic that they don't' make films for older people.