Noah Baumbach Quotes

If you're lucky enough to work with great actors and creative people, they're always just going to be who they are, so I don't think there's a difference between the Brits and the Americans.

I want to make films without a single clear message, and films that are as close as possible to what it feels like to be alive. At least to me.

I don't think there's any formula for what makes great art.

I don't think I'm making any great statements, and I certainly don't think I'm making art.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

I try not to picture a reader when I'm writing. It's like trying to make a great table but not picturing anybody sitting at it.

I just make films that attract me.

In a lot of ways, I feel like I'm just taking the music that comes to me and trying to make it as beautiful as I can. You can't really predict or control how people will receive that music.

You hear it said time and time again by successful directors: You have to make a movie for yourself. Don't make it for anyone else. My style of filmmaking happens to be give the audience what they know they don't want, but they want. Ultimately I have to write and direct in a way that let's just say, you don't want to regret making a choice.

Where does beauty begin? Where does it end? Where it ends is where the artist begins.

Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect.

It's really interesting to observe each filmmaker's approach to filmmaking and I feel very fortunate to have worked with a lot of really interesting filmmakers and they all approach their job in unique ways.

A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.

I think, as the writer, you're always going to mourn something [left out of a film]. But you also just want to know there's a good reason for it being left out. On the whole, you want to give something to somebody creative. The worst thing you can do is say, "Here, be creative, but do it like I want you to do it." I was always very mindful of that.

I feel like you have to make art because you have to make it. But the end result of it- that last stage- you have to show it to somebody else to hopefully get a rise or reaction out of them- [to see] if it’ll affect someone else.

Everything I do with BLK DNM is more personal than anything I have done before. I've worked hard to go deeper in my true intuition, and therefore I am definitely more pure in my personal taste than ever.

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.

I always feel when you work with an artist and whenever I work with a really good photographer, I try to give him or her their own artistic freedom because that's the way you get the best work or at least the most interesting work.

When I get ready to do an album, that means I have something to say for the sake of words, and I listen back to all of the things I've been creating and pull things from out of the air to go with them. It's almost like I start creating the album before I even think about creating it.

The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared.

I'm doing more than just making songs for the radio. I want it to be a well rounded sounding experience.

We talked a lot with the musician. And for now there are few options, and I give him few weeks to come and surprise me with something. I don't want to start and say, okay here is what I want. Because maybe he has an idea that is better than mine.

Unlike prose writing, the strange process of writing with pictures encourages associations and recollections to accumulate literally in front of your eyes; people, places, and events appear out of nowhere. Doors open into rooms remembered from childhood, faces form into dead relatives, and distant loves appear, almost magically, on the page- all deceptively manageable, visceral, the combinations sometimes even revelatory.

When I am painting I have a general notion as to what I am about. I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident.