Mark Morris Quotes

I've always been somebody who, when I started a picture, never knew what the next picture would be.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

To some extent I happily don't know what I'm doing. I feel that it's an artist's responsibility to trust that.

In my work, I have never had any use for anything that I have known in advance.

We have the script, we have the actors, and we're trying to figure out what this is, and you don't know what it is. You have to be open to what it's going to become rather than have this thing that you're trying to get to, which is boring.

My methodology is not knowing what I'm doing and making that work for me.

I'm not a career filmmaker. I just like to do things that I still kind of believe in and because of that you just never know what's going to happen next. It doesn't matter if it's been a good year or a bad year: next year, there's no telling what it will be like.

The whole thing about the way I approach work is to be surprised by an opportunity when it comes up. So I have no idea what I will be doing next, and I kind of like that.

Producing a series is like being Lewis and Clark: You know where you're going, you just don't know how you're going to get there. When people say, 'You should create a bible for your show,' I say, 'You don't want a bible. It'll prevent you from making discoveries along the way.' And that's what happened on 'The X-Files.'

The main thing in making art often is letting go of your expectation and your idea.

I never make a choice thinking about the results. I'm never gonna take a role or a project thinking where this could - what this could bring me or something like that, because you've got no control about anything, actually.

I don't make plans for my future. I have learned that you cannot predict what will happen.

I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.

The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control - to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children's cartoons or utopian novels. But it's just a fantasy.

When I do a take, I very often try things that I haven't planned to try to see if I can pull it off.

The apparatus has to serve our improbability and improvisation. Being good and playing the songs is not enough.

A good director's not sure when he gets on the set what he's going to do.

I'm in no hurry to get anywhere. I don't have any plans. I don't have a map. If you did in this business, you'd destroy yourself.

I'm a great believer in chaos. I don't believe that you start with a formula and then you fulfill the formula. Chaos is a much better instigator, because we live in chaos - we don't live in a rigorous form.

My whole life has been one big improvisation.

I'm always surprised at what I actually end up doing because I don't have a strategy or a game plan, especially now that I'm making my own choices.

I think that's the thing I learned at 'Saturday Night Live' - any time I would try and strategize, I would always, always fall on my face. Things worked out when I tried to make it about what I was feeling at that moment and what I was into in that moment of my life.

I do not see myself, I never make plans, I never set goals, and I never do that kind of stuff; I don't like to futurize, I barely know what I will do tomorrow, and because there is a working plan here, I've never futurized because life always surprises me with things even better.

You can make all the birth plans in the world, but at the end of the day - go with the flow.

With 'Silver Linings,' I didn't feel - I was thinking of certain things, but I just said, 'Let me go with it.' You have to know what you're doing, where you're going with the scenes, and I put a lot of work into that. But when you're out there, at the same time you gotta be ready for anything.