The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements.
Painting, like poetry, selects in the universe whatever she deems most appropriate to her ends. She assembles in a single fantastic personage, circumstances and features which nature distributes among many individuals. From this combination, ingeniously composed, results that happy imitation by virtue of which the artist earns the title of inventor and not of servile copyist.
The creative act does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, and skills.
With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don't think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.
If I had 10 ideas and people said yes to all of them, half of them could be crap. But, if I've got 10 ideas and we really only have the budget for one of them, then we have to pick the best one that is our most creative element.
There are good photographers who might elevate themselves to the ranks of the great simply by burning most of their work.
It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems; our poems choose us.
But most scripts are terrible. Most projects are bad, that's just kind of the way it is. And I'm not really attracted to those.
Probably 95 percent of the things that are written never get on the screen.
The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.
I write all year long, and at the end of the year I pull these forty or fifty things out and say, 'Which of these things do I want to record?'
Every writer is necessarily a critic - that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg - nine-tenths of him is under water.
