Steven Soderbergh Quotes

I think we always move from imitation to assimilation to innovation, but I can't name you 20 people outside those we've already recognized who ever got to point three: innovation.

The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.

Originality and creativity are nothing but the result of the wise management of combinations. The creative genius combines more rapidly, and with a greater critical sense of what gets tossed out and what gets saved, the same material that the failed genius has to work with.

The creative act does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, and skills.

I don't think I've invented anything. Henry Ford didn't invent the car, and Steve Jobs didn't invent the cell phone, and he didn't invent the digital revolution, but he could adapt, put things together in creative ways. So I think in what we do there's a lot of "let's try it and sees," whether it's a new color or a new style. But we didn't invent cosmetics or lingerie. How we market them - style, color - those are the things that we do, but it isn't pure creation. It's putting together ideas. I truly believe there's nothing really new in the world.

There are people who are originals and the stuff they make really is new. It isn't based on anything else. But I've decided I'm not that-I was never that. My abilities are to synthesize a wide range of references and ideas into something that feels relatively unified and coherent.

You need a strong sense of 'otherness' to be able to create in your life.

When you are pushing yourself to not go back to the same well, you're gonna come up with something different, or you'll find songs that are different.

I stay true to myself and my style, and I am always pushing myself to be aware of that and be original.

You know, I don't really do that much looking inside me when I'm working on a project. Whatever I am becomes what that film is. But I change; you change.

Most of us don't invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.

I don't choose to analyze what I have done and I think that is the right choice, because then I won't be spending my time creating.

I always try to improve, to find new ways of expressing myself, to keep looking for truth and originality.

I'm interested in creating new work.

A kind of synthesis, but with some elements that perhaps you wouldn't have expected in advance. I always like that when that happens, when something comes that is more than the sum of the parts.

I like to do things that I develop from the ground up.

I tried to draw people more realistically, but the figure I neglected to update was myself.

The feeling of being at sea has put me in touch with who I am to a greater degree than if I had been on land all these years. So, in a roundabout way, I imagine it does inform my acting.

Young writers often mistakenly choose a certain vein or style based on who they want to be, unconsciously trying to blot out who they actually are. You want to escape yourself.

I remember a distinct moment when it was my junior year of college, and the content I was making was changing and not really myself, and I tried to switch back to just putting me out there. I'm happy that happened really early in my career, because that was before I started doing podcasts or writing.

Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

To me that's what Jobs was about. He said at the end of the movie, 'When you realize that the world was created by people no smarter than you, your life will change.' That, to me, is a message for right now and people figuring out what they're going to do with themselves.

I never want to repeat myself. I can't imagine anything else as upsetting as realizing I'm redoing something I did before. For some reason, when it comes to film, I'm very good at not repeating myself. Even though in the rest of my life, I'm constantly repeating my mistakes.

I always wanted to be really experimental.

What guides me is to do work that's more avant-garde - things that I think are special. You can easily become a celebrity and get caught up in all that blur. I just want to work and surprise myself.