Ernst Lubitsch Quotes

When I create something, it's got to be special, and it can't just be to throw something out there because I feel like I'm Missy.

I think any artist is a perfectionist by their nature.

An artist cannot do anything slovenly.

To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view.

I never choose a genre over quality. I never think, 'I want to do that,' and sacrifice the fact it might not be very good.

I don't listen to my songs. The only time I do it is when someone points out a flaw in the end product.

I don't play everything I write. I mean, everything I write is not that good. I bring out into the world the ones I think that are really worthy of an audience's attention.

I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying.

It is better to have a good painting with ten holes than ten bad paintings without any holes.

What I've learned from sketch is you can get it as perfect as you want, and it's never going to be perfect.

I think it's important for anyone who is artistic to look back on their body of work and be critical. Maybe the Beatles can look back and say everything was perfect, but we've come up with hundreds and hundreds of dishes, and anyone who is honest with themselves has to realize that every single one wasn't an absolute, unequivocal home run.

In the world of reality the more beautiful a work of art, the longer, we may be sure, was the time required to make it, and the greater the number of different minds which assisted in its development.

Digital photography and Photoshop have made it very easy for people to take pictures. It's a medium that allows a lot of mediocre stuff to get through.

Technique! The very word is like a shriek of outraged Art. It is the idiot name given to effort by those who are too weak, too weary, or too dull to play the game. The mighty have no theory of technique.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

In art the best is good enough.

One of the big songwriting things for me has always been: always think what you do sucks. Because the second you stop believing that, you suck. And that's a fact.

I can't leave the studio until everything is as it should be. And I can't put a record out unless I am completely happy with it. I never want to be at a signing and hear my album playing and think, 'Oh no, I could have done that top note better.'

When I finish a picture I don't show it to anyone if I feel it's not good enough yet. I've learnt to listen to my partners and my friends. For me it's the biggest success if they like it.

I'd rather not make films than make bad ones.

I'm just going to write my books and do my work and release it. Let the world decide what it is, and if it's any good or not.

I'm more critical of the films I make than anyone else.

Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence.

It don't matter who I'm working with. I just feel like I want to make the best record possible.

You always wanna make the best record you ever made, and if I feel like I didn't do that, I wouldn't put it out.