Pamela Druckerman Quotes

The creative act is also in a small way a suffering act - we start out with our ego, this hope of making this thing whatever it be, but so often it eludes us and it collapses and we kind of regress into this mental suffering, we can't find what we're looking for.

What I wanted and what I visualized while composing has not always been realized.

It is a little bit demoralizing to work a show, and you just try so many times to get something, and the creator just keeps saying, 'No, not that.' Then they just instantly come up with something.

I was very disappointed that so much of the work I did on The Haunted Mansion didn't arrive in the final cut.

I find in working always the disturbing intrusion of elements not a part of my most interested vision, and the inevitable obliteration and replacement of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds.

A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.

I'm envious of writers and musicians. I think it must be so difficult. Not just the frustration, but the discipline.

There are whole months at a time when my head is so full of ideas that I wake in the middle of the night and lie in the dark telling myself stories. There are also long, dark nights when I just know I'll never write another word: I'm finished, empty, a husk... Oh dear, yes, twitch, yawn, how I've suffered insomnia for my art.

And when you see it the first time you put the film together, the roughest cut, is when you want to go home and open up your veins and get in a warm tub and just go away. And then it gradually, maybe, works its way back, somewhere toward that spot you were at before.

Sometimes, trying to make a work of art can be very difficult and very painful.

When I draw something, the incredibly annoying thing is that it doesn't come out like I pictured.

I think being creative is incredibly difficult and painful.

I think attempting to make art is a utopian process in itself, definitely. Nothing I do is ever equal to the ideas in my head. You do the best you can, you do it with patience and love, and then you give up. The moment you give up is when you know the book is done.

But to make the intangible tangible, to pick the emotion out of the air and make it true for others, is both the blessing and the curse of the writer, for the thing between book covers is never as beautiful as the thing he imagined.

I don't really have any advice, other than to say it's the most appallingly difficult thing I've ever tried to do and I wish I had a better idea of how to do it. In my experience what you end up with is the by-product of your failure to achieve what you set out to do. It may turn out OK, but it wasn't what you meant and you've no idea how you got there.

In editing, you really face what the movie is. When you shoot it, you have this illusion that you're making the masterpieces that you're inspired by. But when you finally edit the movie, the movie is just a movie, so there is always a hint of disappointment, particularly when you see your first cut.

I have heard painters acknowledge, though in that acknowledgment no degradation of themselves was intended, that they could do better without nature than with her; or as they express themselves, 'that it only put them out.

Sometimes even the imagination lets one down.

That's what it feels like when I write, like I have this beautiful world in my head, but when I try to remember it in order to write it down, I change it, and I can't ever get it back.

writing is the loneliest job in the world. There's always that frustrating chasm to bridge between the concept and the writing of it. We're a harassed tribe, we writers.

I think that when you create something or at least try to create something, you slither between excitement and pleasure and you understand this huge emotional frustration. You did one feat, then you go back one.

If you're working on something and it's not coming together, it's easy to say, "I don't want to show this, until I've figured it out." But a lot of times you don't really solve the problems, and then you start getting into a bad situation because you don't have the time to fix it.

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

[Martin] Scorsese says one of the great things he loves about it is how Mark can't get the right shot and he's killing people because he can't get the right shot. It's an example of what film-makers are like.