Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.
At the interface of the say-able and the unsay-able is the novel, the new, the never before seen, said or done. And that's what I think it's important to try and bring out, ideas. Because I think we are the animals that bring back ideas.
The difference between Talent and Genius is that Talent says things which he has never heard but once, and Genius things which he has never heard.
I have this theory that your first film is always your best film in some way. I always try to get back to that moment when you're not relying on things you've done before.
I'm always trying to do things that no one has ever seen before.
You have to be doing something very different from what everybody else is doing, hopefully different from what's ever been done before - something that nobody's thought of yet.
What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.
Most songs I write are spur-of-the-moment-type things. I have to be spontaneous. If not, songwriting can bore me. There is no pre-design or idea of what I am going to do when I go into the studio. It's all like that for me. I could go in and write two or three songs in an eight-hour session. You can't over-think songs. You just can't.
In a way, there's nothing new under the sun, so anything you write about has been written about by other people. All you can do is bring yourself to it, bring as much honesty as you can to it.
If they haven't heard it before it's original.
If it feels like you're aiming for something too familiar, and you're not having a primary new experience, then what's the point of making that movie? It's been done before, so try to find something new out of it.
if sometimes we are bogged down in lines full of "corybulous", "hypogeum", "plangent", "irrefragably", "glozening", "tellurian", "conclamant", sometimes we are caught up in the soaring rapture of something unprecedented, absolutely individual.
I always wrote with some kind of angle of ignorance. I didn't know what was right or wrong.
