Spike Jonze Quotes

The '90s weren't my finest years artistically. I wrote some good songs in there, but in terms of my vision of getting the paint on the canvas, that was not my best time. I didn't like the fact that I had fallen into mediocrity.

'Shun security,' I advise aspiring novelists when they complain to me that they are stuck. 'Get disoriented. Maybe your agonizing writing block isn't agonizing enough. Your enemy is comfort.'

I gave up writing for seven years (very biblical) and picked it up again, still clueless and still seeking the exotic, when I was twenty-one.

The important thing for me as an artist is to keep going back to the page and doing what I do.

As a producer and director, I've tried for years to get properties off the ground for girls, and I've been hitting a brick wall.

There were times in 'Adaptation' during the editing where I really thought, 'Okay, well, this was a noble failure. I tried to do something good, but this is not going to work.'

Every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out.

People say if you're doing an art project, that's different from a book, but I honestly don't see it. I try and try, and I just don't.

I try and reduce myself to an almost blank slate and hope to God that I am creative.

That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.

Ease is the enemy of the artist. When things get too easy, you're in trouble.

As a creative person, you want to be creative, you know? You don't want to constantly wait around - a lot of movies fall apart, or there's just not as much out there as there used to be.

Any journey of a creative person has, you know, really unusual challenges and years where you don't work and years where you work.

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

I think there's no creative process that goes without injuries and scratches and punches. You get beat up somehow, and that's part of the commitment. You have to be open to that.

Actually, after 'All Love Lost' I was so drained creatively that I didn't have any clue where I wanted to go. So I just started from scratch.

Maybe I can't write without painting myself into a corner first.

I know someone might look at a creative person's job and think it's pretty fun. It is. It's the best thing in the world, but it's also extremely challenging to carve out your own completely unique path and not following a default path that someone else has already paved.

I think being creative is incredibly difficult and painful.

I have a very, very secret drive to become a dilettante, without the pejorative overtones or the obligation to produce myself. There's so much to examine, so much to contemplate. I have enormous enthusiasm when I start a new project but then there's the meetings and the counter-meetings, the rehearsals, the struggles. You have to keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get your dreams realised.

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.

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.

Sometimes something will come along, and it feels easy and sometimes you'll get 85 percent there on a song and the last 15 percent will elude you for three years.

I find it really hard to throw myself into something artistically where I'm making up a whole character and finding something for that character to do.

I just said, you know, this is a great track but this lyric, I don't believe it. It sounds like I'm trying to say something, instead of it naturally coming out of me, like I was saying something that I already knew. Anyway, I can't remember what it was. And either I threw it all out or I threw 90 percent of it out, and kept a line or two. That's happened a couple of times to me. Not too often, but a couple of times. Very aggravating when it does happen.