Francis Ford Coppola Quotes

We live in a world where art is always looked upon as the perfect medium. We live in a society where we can alter our body parts, we can act in the most perfect or right way. A lot of that is dangerous because, especially in the world of art, the chief enemy of creativity is being safe. If you're safe, you can't fall and hurt yourself. The older you are, the further down the crash is going to be. But if it works out, the higher the high.

I love to get to that place where I don't know what kind of music I'm doing; I don't know if it's any good. I don't know if it's anything. It's a big question mark. The idea is to have interesting results. That's my bottom line.

I think if you don't risk something in art, it's not really important.

An artist should be taking risks. That's the whole idea of being an artist.

We have to take risks with art. If we don't, it all becomes a bit boring.

I remember on my very first film, which Steven Soderberg executive-produced, he said, 'Try not to repeat yourself. Do things that scare you.' Even if it's a challenge, I want people to say that this guy tried this thing. Hopefully he learned from it.

Half of art is accident, but there is no accident without free experiment.

If you're not allowed to experiment anymore for fear of being considered self-indulgent or pretentious or what have you, then everyone's going to just stick to the rules - there's not going to be any additional ideas.

None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.

An artist, to achieve anything in art, has to finally do the thing that nobody else wants to do and nobody else has thought to do.

You're not always going to hit the bull's-eye. I'm going to make movies that work and I'm going to make movies that don't work, and that's just a part of being creative. Because really, I think if you're taking risks and you're pushing yourself and you're doing things that scare you, you are going to fall on your face, and it's not always going to work.

An essential element of any art is risk. If you don't take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn't been seen before?

I'm widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I'm not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.

See, if you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that - but he's got to think differently in order to do it. He's got to play above what he knows - far above it. I've always told the musicians in my band to play what they know and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that's where great art and music happens.

What's interesting about making art is that you take everything you know about it and you bring it up to that point, and you start making a physical thing that addresses what that is. And when you do it, you don't know anything about it - if it's going to work or not work.

I tell the actors that the biggest gift they can give me is to fail. And that the second gift they can give me is to surprise me.

You cannot play for safety and make art.

Cinema without risk is like having no sex and expecting to have a baby.

Photography is still a very new medium and everything must be tried and dare.

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

It was actually the enormous risks I took with my pictures, skating right up to the edge of non-acceptance, that paid off so handsomely.

Artists live in unknown spaces and give themselves over to following something unknown.

There's no way to really mock up or simulate what I'm doing until I'm there. An exhibition for me is not a statement but an experiment.

I'm an artist, and I like the risk - I'm not in it for the sure things.

It's all about risk-taking when you're making an album. Don't be scared to do weird things sometimes.