Creative Obstacles Quotes

Over the years, I would go to my agents, my manager, and I would say, 'Hey, there's this amazing true story about this gay English mathematician who committed suicide in the 1950s.' And they would be like, 'Please don't ever write that script. That is an unmakeable film.'

Honestly, production when you first start can be difficult to wrap your head around.

It took five years to get 'Parental Guidance' made, and it was a fight every second.

It's tricky to ask a filmmaker to explain his own work; usually we're the least qualified to make sense of what we've done, unfortunately, because of the tunnel vision required to create anything over four years.

Well, we are not doing that film actually. At least I am not at the moment, but we are making an effort to get it done; I don't know whether we'll get the financing for it. The old story we had it, it fell out of place and this and that.

How can I make a movie about the violence of the police if the police aren't going to let me film it?

It's actually shocking to me how hard it's been to get back into the movie business.

Plot and scene are still the hardest things for me, though I think they're the building blocks of what makes a story work.

Nonfiction filmmakers were afflicted by two problems: one technical, the other spiritual. Technically, they did not have the equipment to do the sort of work I had in mind. Spiritually, they didn't care about the work because they'd been mistrained.

You do have to kind of sit down and try to write, because it's not the easiest thing when you're off and on planes. I'm sure if you're always on a bus, it's a little bit easier.

I wrote 'Time of the Dark' in 1978 and 'The Silent Tower' in 1984, so the thing that sticks out for me is how totally technology has changed. I suppose that's the great peril for real-world crossovers.

There are a million talented writers who are unpublished only because they stop writing when it gets hard.

I feel like a lot of time my writing is like having about twenty boxes of Christmas decorations. But no tree. You're going, Where do I put this? Then they go, Okay, you can have a tree, but we'll blindfold you and you gotta cut it down with a spoon.

I have a specific set of, I have a specific sort of negative energies to deal with that might be specific to me, but it definitely something that all artists have to deal with at one point or another. But I think for me, it's just maybe more specific.

I've watched so many women, from Kathleen Hanna all the way up to Taylor Swift, whether they're pop artists or rock stars or fine artists or writers, it is the subhistory of female artists that if you're going to make art, you're also going to have a full-time job of defending your right to make art.

I had a tough time 12 years ago getting 'Driving Miss Daisy' off the ground. Today, it would be impossible.

The film business has so many twists and turns that it's a miracle any film gets made.

Trying to write books with a subject matter or in a genre or style you're not familiar with is the best way to find the Big Block looming.

Any one thing can get in the way of you and your brain being comfortable and being inspired. It's the difference between a really big song and a song that never existed.

When you try to bring a story to life, it starts in your head and you see possibilities for it, but it's just one damn thing after another.

In my journey as a cartoonist, I seem to have accidentally stumbled into all sorts of traps, damnations and blacklists.

Movies are - all I've found is that they're just tougher and tougher to make.

It is so hard to get movies made in Hollywood that you got to have six going at once, and you know, probably none of those get made.

Making a film is hard because you're not dealing with the intangible. When you're writing, it's perfect because it's only in your head and then you have to take it into the physical world and that's where things drop off and things fall apart and you have to fix them.

When I tried to get 'Stargate' made, I took it to every studio in Hollywood and every studio said, 'Sci-fi is dead. It's a dead genre. No one wants to see science fiction anymore.' And I had to go and raise the money independently to make that movie.