Robert Lepage Quotes

One knew in advance that life in New York would not be easy, but there were cheap rents in cold-water lofts without heat, and the excitement of being here made up for those hardships. I didn't move to New York to make a fortune.

It's that anonymous person who meanders through the streets and feels what's happening there, feels the pulse of the people, who's able to create.

Living in London as a student is tough. And my heart goes out to every single drama student in London because, as an actor, it's a creative process that you are taking on, and if you don't get to do it every day, it hurts.

Most artists don't get paid for what they do, and they are lucky if they can persuade a friend to let them show something at a kid's birthday party.

I don't care much for the cities.

New York, to me, is the arts capital of the world. I just feel so inspired when I'm there. I would love to live there at some point in my life and do a play.

I like living in a smaller place, but I like being in big cities, too, like Athens.

Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance.

Painting to me is addictive. These are moments when it is inspiring, but they are few and far between. I keep my tools sharpened for the moment when things do start clicking, but that doesn't happen a lot. I really have to push myself sometimes. Painting is a profession in which it is very easy to be lazy, particularly if you have any degree of success.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

Whether it's a painter finding his way each morning to the easel, or a medical researcher returning daily to the laboratory, the routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more.

Still I should paint my own places best; painting is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate "my careless boyhood" with all that lies on the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful; that is, I had often thought of pictures of them before ever I touched a pencil, and your picture ['The White Horse'] is one of the strongest instance I can recollect of it.

With each movie I have a different set of inspirations.

When I am working a book, I go through my library and take a look through some of the great cartoonists of the past, like Cliff Sterrett, who did "Polly and Her Pals," or Winsor McCay who did "A Little Nemo in Slumberland," and Herriman - and I just looked through these guys and looked for somebody to steal. You know, looked for who I could swipe, or turn into - who's work I will turn into my work. And I still use, after all these years, these artists as inspirations. So, here in my eighties, I go back to when I was eight for my inspiration.

When I do music I don't do it with a purpose in mind. I just feel like it's a little bit contrived if you try to do something like that. It's got to come organically.

What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?

No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.

No poem was ever written by a drinker of water.

It was among the ruins of the capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised nearly twenty years of my life.

Sometimes something will come along, and it feels easy and sometimes you'll get 85 percent there on a song and the last 15 percent will elude you for three years.

Artistic inspiration ignores the law of supply and demand.

Just dash something down if you see a blank canvas staring at you with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing it is, that staring of a blank canvas which says to the painter: you don't know anything.

I don't have an idea for a play until after I've finished writing it. I write first, and come up with what it's about later. My technique could be compared to having a large canvas and coming in every day and putting a dot on it somewhere, and after several years - literally - I begin to say, That reminds me of an elephant, so I think I'll make it one.

It is well for young men to have a model, but let them draw the curtain over it while they are painting.