Lee Unkrich Quotes

I think, with most writers, their neurosis is finishing things. I have a different neurosis. I'm terribly anxious when it's not finished. Then I become really difficult to live with.

I'm like any other composer. If you give me five years to write a symphony, I'm still going to be asking for more time two days before it's due.

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

By the time I'm done with a project, it's taken so long that I usually don't even like it anymore. I only see the things I wish I'd done differently.

I rarely like the music I make. It's like nothing's good enough. I just stay in my head, waiting on the next best beat, so I can do something better than what I did.

There are problems in doing television that have been plaguing me for years. I really like to have a lot of time, to rehearse and make things as good as they can be, but television often doesn't allow for that.

I can make something for a long time and just not come up with an ending. It's finishing things that I don't enjoy.

The hardest part for me is to finish a track. I start new projects all the time.

Everything takes me forever. It's all lurch, flail. I hope that is good news to you writers.

I think any time you set out to make something, anybody is going to be confronted by those voices in their head that say "You don't need to do this. Someone else can do this better. You should probably just quit right now."

It takes an awful lot of time to not write a book.

I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow.

I'm an extremely slow worker, very unprolific. It can take me weeks to do a three-minute song, or at least to make it sound, in my mind, like I haven't written it. That's when I'm satisfied.

... I had never given much credence to the phenomenon of "writer's block". I was more inclined to think of it as "writer's impatience", and to follow Arthur Koestler's dictum: "Soak; and wait.

I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.

When you're writing a movie or a play and writing isn't going well, which is for me the normal condition - it's an exceptional day when suddenly I've got something and it's going well - you can call the studio or the producer or whoever is waiting for it and say, "I know I said I was going to have it in by the end of the summer.

Simply do something else and return to it later to find the problem wasn't a problem at all. Ruptures almost always lead to a stronger project.

I procrastinate, and I push writing to the last available moment, because I don't like to settle on anything. I guess you can call it indecision or you can call it holding out for inspiration.

If it takes you a year to cut a record, I don't know, you need to find something else to do. It really shouldn't take that long.

I actually start drawing things. Usually they're abandoned before I commit too much time and effort.

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.

I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.

I remember a point in [writing] the story where I said, "This isn't working, I should go and buy something at the supermarket or my wife will kill me." Then I said, "No, I'll go on."

My wanting to write books annihilates the original root impulse that would have me bravely and blunderingly working on them.

I procrastinate to a point where I'm filled with self-loathing and then I start writing. It's usually a state of self-loathing that gets me going.