Danny Elfman Quotes

I still don't know if I can write songs. I don't think anyone ever knows if they can write songs.

One of the odd things about being a writer is that you never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, 'Right. Now I understand how this is done.'

I think making art is something where you think you know, you also know you don't know and you hope - all these things are in play all the time. I think it's what makes the excitement of creativity for the artist.

A lot of times, I write and have to scrap it. You don't know what I'm talking about because the words are too much, and it's overwhelming.

I'm a nervous sharer. I'm nervous to share things in their unfinished state just because, I mean, it's kind of embarrassing. You know what it could be, but you can't explain what it's going to be.

I've done a lot of movies, and you really never know. You do a movie and you think that it's great, and then you see it and it doesn't work.

I think that feels like it to me. I mean whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it - every word has a big question mark over it.

Strange, I feel as if up to now I had written no more than a few notes.

I think for every artist it's important to always keep this amount of doubt until the very last day of shooting.

I'm not the kind of person that's so self-confident that I would ever think I had recorded anything great. I know that whenever we finish an album and turn it in, I know that in my deepest heart of hearts that we did the best that we could. Only time goes on to tell what I will think of it 10 years later or if people will listen to it forever or if people will get tired of it.

I wasn't sure I was an artist, so I thought maybe I just was throwing ideas out for people to consider.

Songwriting is a mystery. And it's a mystery to me that it's a mystery. But that sounds stupid.

When you do a television show in the States, you get the pilot, and then it's the great unknown. That's the way it is. It's this great leap of faith. It's the Russian roulette of art.

What profession is more trying than that of author? After you finish a piece of work it only seems good to you for a few weeks; or if it seems good at all you are convinced that it is the last you will be able to write; and if it seems bad you wonder whether everything you have done isn’t poor stuff really; and it is one kind of agony while you are writing, and another kind when you aren’t.

You make a movie and it's like convincing people to go on an expedition with you. You think you know where it's going to end up, and you're hoping and guessing. But, when people trust you and get involved, based on that trust, it's a really nice feeling to be able to have everything pay off.

Whenever you're making a movie, especially when you're writing, you always have self-doubts.

Living is a form of not being sure, not know what next or how... The artists never entirely knows.

When I'm writing, I'm thinking, "Well, this might be a book that I'll always be happy with, and certainly readers will be happy with." But another part of me knows that when I'm past the stage of writing, the book is gonna have good things about it, bad things about it - probably more bad than good. I just know that. That's who I am.

You hope that the ideas will come together. You just don't know. That's part of what I suppose is part of being brave and putting creative work out there.

I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write

It's often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It's what writing comes down to--worrying that things aren't going to work out.

I don't know what it is I'm doing. But it's not that. Despite all evidence to the contrary.

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

If you ask me, Now, is it your best book? I would say, I don't really know. I wouldn't even want to say. And I'd even go on and say, I don't even think so.

Like most writers I spend a lot of my time sort of thinking, "It's such agony, I can't do it."