Creative Rejuvenation Quotes

Writing screenplays makes me a better musician because it clears my head. After writing a movie, I go running back to music as fast as I can.

At first, I am giving energy to the creation, but later the creation seems to be giving energy to me.

I wouldn't have been in the mind-set to do another 'Fly.'

How often my soul visits the National Gallery, and how seldom

When I went to the sets of 'ABCD,' I felt younger. Surrounded by so many young dancers, I, too, became a dancer again.

I've seen bands split up for five years and do nothing. That sounds great to me, but it just hasn't worked out that way.

As in a love affair, two creative people can destroy themselves trying to recapture that youthful spirit, at twenty-one or twenty-four, of creating without even being aware of how it's happening

Often when I finish a film I'll have that feeling inside me: 'I never want to do this ever again. I don't want to pretend anymore. I want to be myself and do that.' And then, thank God, that feeling goes away after a month or so and I'm raring to go again.

The truth is I made a few good movies in the '50s, then went into freefall.

I guess something that you love to do, you gotta ease up off it and give it a little space, come back and be fresh to it.

When people don't hear you on the radio they think 'maybe he retired.'

I wonder, when a writer's blocked and doesn't have any resources to pull himself out of it, why doesn't he jump in his car and drive around the U.S.A.? I went last winter for seven thousand miles and it was lovely. Inexpensive, too.

Every year or so, I try to do something; it keeps me refreshed as to what's going on in front of the lens, and I understand what the actor is going through.

I hope my next movie is with like 80 year olds because I want to feel young again.

Aly and I went through just a long period of time where we just didn't feel creative musically. And, you know, we went through the whole writer's block thing, and we went through having two pretty successful records and figuring out how we want to transition as adults.

You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry, I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.

The idea [of A Period of Transition album] was to get a break from everything for a while because I've been doing it for so long. I started doing it when I was 12.

Whoever lives for poetry must read everything. How often has the light of a new idea sprung for me from a simple brochure! When one allows himself to be animated by new images, he discovers iridescence in the images of old books. Poetic ages unite in a living memory. The new age awakens the old. The old age comes to live again in the new. Poetry is never as unified as when it diversifies.

For awhile there, I kind of hit the plateau. Anytime you do that as an artist, one of two things can happen... you're either going to start to fall back off, or you're gonna start to rise.

Yes, I get dry spells. Sometimes I can't turn out a thing for three months. When one of those spells comes on I quit trying to work and go out and see something of life. You can't write a story that's got any life in it by sitting at a writing table and thinking. You've got to get out into the streets, into the crowds, talk with people, and feel the rush and throb of real life-that's the stimulant for a story writer.

In general, each form is a relief from the other forms. I can't write a novel after a novel. I just use up all the material each time, and I need to rest.

One of the reasons I went back to music even though I was extremely ill was because I started to forget who I was aside from being sick. And when I'm performing, or even lecturing, it's like I'm myself again, and that was a really amazing discovery - that, all of a sudden, I have a get-out-of-jail-free card.

If I retain any freshness of approach, it's by going slowly having long intervals between finished projects.

When I'm not acting, I do like to take a year off at a time, at least if I can, just in order to keep acting exciting - otherwise I get bored very quickly.

If I get writer's block - this is going to sound funny - I take a shower. Something about the water feels like I'm cleaning my brain as well as my body.