Creative Uncertainty Quotes

We can guarantee you that 15 to 30 seconds of any of our songs are going to be good. The rest, we can't guarantee.

Writing the record for me - every record is almost a surprise. When people ask me, what are the themes you want to grapple with on this one? I have no idea until the record's finished.

Everyone around me says, You're a genius! You're great! That's your voice! But I'm not sure if they're right.

I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for.

Each time I undertake to paint a picture I have a sensation of leaping into space. I never know whether I shall fall on my feet. It is only later that I begin to estimate more exactly the the effect of my work.

I think it's your own ghost, seeing the work and just thinking if it will be okay to leave that around.

I might just write a novel next. I don't know!

I don't know if I should say this, but I feel more like a singer than an artist.

The craziest thing about TV directing is I turned in a version, and then they made their final changes - so I don't know what they are. So I'm like, "Ooo, I'm dying to see the final print."

I'm fascinated by musicians who don't completely understand their territory; that's when you do your best work.

It's funny how that comes up, because sometimes I'll write something and I'll think, I don't know if that's a film or a play, and then other things I feel very strongly about them just being plays - they feel very theatrical to me.

In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.

People always say, 'Who is your audience?' and I could never put a finger on it - and I wouldn't want to put a finger on it.

Being blocked, being uncertain, sitting there not knowing, waiting, abiding with it: this is the work. If you don't have the tolerance for that you're in great trouble. If you want to call it a writer's block... that doesn't seem a very useful name for that kind of abiding that I think is the essence of the work.

Writing a novel - unlike operating a piece of heavy machinery, say, or cooking a chicken - is not a skill that can be taught. There is no standard way of doing it, just as there is no means of telling, while you're doing it, whether you're doing it well or badly. And merely because you've done it well once doesn't mean you can do it well again.

The best directors I've worked with, they all have the same thing in common. They're the first to say, 'I don't know.' If you ask them, 'How are we actually pulling off this movie?', they'll just shrug and go, 'I have absolutely no idea.'

On stage, you have to have incredible confidence, or you would stop doing it. But I don't think I will ever get to the point where I go, 'I know exactly what I am doing,' and I don't think I want to.

I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it's very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like.

I've often wished when I started a book I knew what was going to happen. I talked to writers who write 80-page outlines, and I'm just in awe of that.

It's just that... working on 'Green Lantern,' I saw how difficult it is to make that concept palatable, and how confused it all can be when you don't really know exactly where you're going with it or you don't really know how to access that world properly - that world comic book fans have been accessing for decades and falling in love with.

There are times when directors just don't know what they're doing.

You always feel a degree of insecurity about getting through a film.

My aspiration was to write a book that you could still read in 10 years. That's hard. Then you start doubting every sentence you write.

...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.

You're in the middle of making a movie and this part of the process is always very interesting. Because you think what you're making your movie is and then you start putting it out there, and then people tell you what your movie is.