You've got to find what you love and let it kill you. I don't think any of us should ever forget that.
The best thing commercially, which is the worst artistically, by and large, is the most successful.
When looking at any significant work of art, remember that a more significant one probably has had to be sacrificed.
It's wrong to make a living off the theater. Theater should be supported, like redwood trees. You should make your living - whether you're a writer or an actor or a director - in movies or commercials. But you do theater out of love.
I don't want to sell my soul to Hollywood - to just make run-of-the-mill stuff.
I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.
We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then. If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us, and it outlives its personal moment. All of my work is deep-dug from me, and every book has to stand or fall without me.
It's never easy to adapt a book, especially as the author, because it's as if you're chopping off appendages. It really feels painful to decide what has to go.
I think this last film I finished, 'The Butler,' is the closest I will come to as a work-for-hire.
I've written some great things. That's a gift, but there's consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.
Writers are always selling somebody out.
When you make something that you're really proud of, and it doesn't do well, you can live with it. The hard part is when you make something that you have to compromise on and it doesn't do well.
When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.
The personal lives of painters are tragic and inevitable and do not explain the artist. For the artist is his work and no longer human.
I used to almost not look forward to recording, because it was like, 'Okay, what am I going to have to sacrifice?'
There's a tendency in this Hollywood machinery to take on too much. You end up not being able to give everything you want.
Every one of my books had killed me a little more.
No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.
I'd rather not make films than make bad ones.
It's easy to fall into the trap of just cranking out things that are good enough to sell.
When you actually meet the devil and he offers you a deal most artists eventually negotiate.
Don't be a writer; it's a terrible way to live your life. There's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don't expect anything from anybody.
I certainly do not adore the writer's discipline. I have lost lovers, endangered friendships, and blundered into eccentricity, impelled by a concentration which usually is to be found only in the minds of people about to be executed in the next half hour.
Music is an art and art has its own rules. And one of them is that you must pay more attention to it than anything else in the world, if you are going to be true to yourself. And if you don't do it - and you are an artist - it punishes you.
Writing a play to get to Broadway and have a national tour is a sure way to write a terrible, terrible play.
