Josh Trank Quotes

You'd have to be completely crazy not to be influenced by and take from other artists. It's completely impossible not to.

When I was making my first record there would be something that would come out that would inspire you, you know? You'd see someone on TV or on the radio.

I don't look at other people's work because I don't want to be distracted by their ideas.

I avoid watching other people's versions of films or plays that I work on.

The critics are not writers - they're not a part of the creative process; therefore, they should not influence how I go about doing my next bit of work.

I don't actually read that much. I like movies a bit more. That's how I come up with ideas - by seeing things, hearing things, recycling things. Stealing things!

Everything I do references something that influenced me.

I can't turn hip-hop off, just like I can't turn comic books off. It blends into everything for me.

Artwork, films, TV - it's always informed my work, no matter what I'm working on.

It just sort of happened. I wrote like what I'd always read and what was in the movies... I'm sure popular music is supposed to be like this.

Always, with any movie that I do, I have a book of ideas that I've heard, or seen, or whatever, and I always try to incorporate it in the film.

You know, artists are influenced by other artists. We're all deeply influenced by what's around us; we don't make anything cold. Sometimes we think that we do. But within that, the most important part is that even though we're influenced, what are the levels of invention that we carry forth even as we've been influenced by something that's come before?

My favourite stuff is visual, and I always want to work with visual artwork. I think it depends on the person, but for me, photographs of an image of something interesting or inspiring is worth a lot more than words to me. I think every concept I've come up with and turned into films or that will be hopefully become a film comes from images first.

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

I was sickly as a child and gravitated to books and drawing. During my early teen years, I spent hundreds of hours at my window, sketching neighborhood children at play. I sketched and listened, and those notebooks became the fertile field of my work later on. There is not a book I have written or a picture I have drawn that does not, in some way, owe them its existence.

You know, it's a pretty mysterious thing still, why you start the songs you start, and the specific flavor of them, the nature of them. I don't know about other writers, but, for me, it's still somewhat out of my control. It's not really a logical process.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

I think your life informs your art.

I've been inspired by dreams - I've even stolen scenes or images or characters from them.

I'll write, because I'll give - You critics means to live; For should I not supply - The cause, the effect would die

I didn't sit down then and start writing poems, but it was in the back of my mind.

People have asked me throughout the years which directors have influenced me. I don't know their names, because I was mostly influenced when I'd see a film and think, "Man, I want to be sure to never do anything like that." So I never learned their names. It wasn't a matter of copying or emulating somebody I admired. It was getting rid of a lot of stuff.

People say my films are dark. But like lightness, darkness stems from a reflection of the world. The thing is, I get these ideas that I truly fall in love with. And a good movie idea is often like a girl you're in love with, but you know she's not the kind of girl you bring home to your parents, because they sometimes hold some dark and troubling things.

Neil Young and Barry Friedman had stolen a Buffalo Springfield sign off the steamroller for Barrys house. They put it up. We all looked at it on the wall and a light went off. That's how we came up with the name

If you're going to be an artist, real life is your inspiration.