Creative restraint Quotes

When you start reading a piece together, you get a sense of someone's basic philosophy of music without saying a word. You realize the other person's approach, how they express themselves, the kind of restraint they show, all those things.

Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.

As comedians, we all get into that mode of thinking of the worst thing imaginable - but you usually have the ability to pull back before releasing it to the world.

The best thing anybody has ever done is to advise me against publishing a poem that shows me at less than my best, such as it is. That's the kind of advice most of us resist but really should relish.

Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.

One thing living in Japan did for me was to make me feel that what is left out of a work of art is as important as, if not more important than, what is put in.

Nature can afford to be prodigal in everything, the artist must be frugal down to the last detail. Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.

Because there's so much stuff I don't release.

The perfection of art is to conceal art.

The great art of writing is knowing when to stop.

Here's something weird, though: I loved Jimi's music so much that I would never perform it for people. Throughout my teens and playing in various bands, I refused to play Hendrix songs. I know that sounds strange, but Jimi's music was so special to me that it was like works of art that shouldn't be touched or altered.

There are some composers - at the head of whom stands Beethoven - who not only do not know when to stop but appear to stop many times before they actually do.

In painting feathers, you want to create the look of feathers, but if you try to paint all the feathers, you have nothing but disaster.

I think a lot of the dull parts of first drafts come from a kind of over-managing, intrusive writer who wants to direct traffic. The idea of taking out the parts that the reader could infer is very liberating, and it's weirdly part of radicalizing your work: it allows you to go to new places fast.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

I don't let myself get carried away by my own ideas - I abandon 19 out of 20 of them every day.

I still see the world as a place of bitter irony and black humour, failed hopes, dashed plans. I hope to make my work sparer, to outgrow my desire to show off.

I was never a wet-eyed, passionate writer; I was always a policeman.

Writing is the same as music. It’s in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it. And what you don’t play is as important as what you do say.

My wife is my first reader, my first line of defence I suppose. So she says, "Oh well, oh yes, it's all true." At the same time, I could have written much more about us, but I didn't want to go any further. I did cut things out. There are certain things that I wrote about her that are so gushing with praise and admiration that when I looked at those passages I realised they would be ridiculous to anybody else.

The key to good worldbuilding is leaving out most of what you create. You, as the author, had damn well better know the where all that dragon food comes from, but that doesn't mean that I, as a reader, want to read a five thousand word essay about you explaining it to me. I don't need to see the math, but I can tell by the details you provide whether or not you've thought these things through to their logical conclusions.

I try to play the bare essence, to let everything be just what it's supposed to be in that particular spot...You have many things to pick from when you're playing, so you try to train yourself to pick out the best things that you know.

I'm trying to take pictures of less and less.

Get to the point where the songs sum it all up, and creatively, I'm just like, 'This is it.' I've also learned how to be patient and not really try to overproduce anymore. I used to add instruments, keep adding instruments, but nowadays - I know better now. I know how to let the track breathe.

If I did not publish this autobiography [Les Mots] sooner and in its most radical form, it is because I considered it exaggerated.