Creative Stagnation Quotes

The trap for an actor is that you become too successful at what you're trying to do, and you can find yourself stuck there.

How have you left the ancient love That bards of old enjoyed in you! The languid strings do scarcely move! The sound is forced, the notes are few!

Playwrights are like men who have been dining for a month in an Indian restaurant. After eating curry night after night, they deny the existence of asparagus.

They thought in terms of: whatever you had that started you at the box office, this was it.

After a while, no matter how much you love any pop song, you're going to get tired of it. That's the way it is with any entertainment. It's good when you first hear it or see it, you like it for a while, then it gets old. It gets chewed up and spit out and it's done.

I become more seasoned, it's less interesting to try and compete in the pop market.

Capitalism and power politics have made our generation creatively sluggish, and our vital art is mired in a broad bourgeois philistinism.

I don't feel like I should just be a rapper. That's boring to me.

Artistic development is a thing of the past, sadly.

When I was into my 30s, I became increasingly depressed by rejection letters. I had had the feeling that by the time I was 30, I would be established. But I was not at all. By the time of 'Lives of Girls and Women,' I was into my 40s and I had become more thin-skinned.

I called the album 'The Chemo' because it seems like the industry and music overall is dying slowly.

Every artist will one day face the moment when he or she is doing what he or she does after the style has passed and the art-world heat-seeking machine has moved on.

If they didn't have an Oscar for people to shoot for, all they'd do is be making 'Dumb And Dumber' again and again.

I don't want to feel like I'm stuck doing one-stock performances.

Nothing was made in Trinidad.

A lot of times, when a band finds success with a certain style or sound, they have a really hard time breaking away from that to grow as artists.

Noir is dead for me because historically, I think it's a simple view. I've taken it as far as it can go. I think I've expanded on it a great deal, taken it further than any other American novelist.

I have played characters where I haven't been absorbed - you know, what I call a typical film leading man role where you just have to look gorgeous and be attractive and charming. It bores me. I like a bit of dirt, a bit of sand in the oyster.

I think in my late 20s, I was starting to enter that realm of complacency, which is the most terrifying place I can imagine as an artist. I felt time creeping up on me.

I'm tryin' to think, but nothin' happens!

A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave.

We started the band when I was about 19 or 20. At that age, it would have been kind of hard to imagine a lot of the stuff that I've written. We were playing garage rock. I wanted to dash out three chords and scream. But if you do that for 20 years, what's the point?

Beware the mediocrity that threatens middle age, its limitation of thought and interest, its dullness of fancy, its too external life, and mental thinness.

My biggest excuse to others and myself was that I had writer's block, as if it was some kind of illness.

People are very adamant about maintaining a certain sound or a certain era, like, "There were three years of rap that were great, so let's just keep doing that." The genre itself is just stuck in place. It's been treading water for a while.