artistic dissatisfaction Quotes

I always say I've given 24 insufficient performances and I'm looking forward to the time in my life when I'll do something that I think is good. There's always stuff you can do better, stuff that maybe you didn't uncover enough. But if you do something that you truly believe is perfect, then that's got to be the last movie you do.

I don't know if there are artists out there who love their own records. I haven't met any, and I'm kind of extreme in the other direction, but therein lies the impetus to keep working and keep making new songs and new records.

I think the music business is as crass and as unrewarding as it has ever been.

I never want to be the producer that I too often got.

As an artist, you're always going to be yearning and wanting and never satisfied. I never feel like I've really achieved something.

I vote in the Academy, so I get all the screeners. I'm so often disappointed by all the material and especially by what wins. I find myself never voting for the winner.

I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I've already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That's very discouraging. I hate the book at that point.

As an artist, you're never happy with anything you do. It's part of the process.

I just mean it's very difficult for me to watch my work, in some ways, because I am critical of what I didn't get across or I thought I was making one point.

Even Michelangelo on his deathbed thought he'd done nothing to ennoble art. He wanted to destroy his work-the Pieta! And this from the greatest artist who ever lived. Of course I am not comparing my work to Michelangelo's. But this eternal dissatisfaction of the artist is what I was talking about.

I don't love getting up at the crack of dawn and having makeup put on my face for three hours - like, I really don't like it - and then having a part that's just not that challenging.

I'm having this disbelief and dissatisfaction with an establishment that feels like it's moving backward, and I think there's a similar feeling with everyone of my age and in the world of music and artistic stuff. Art is an important way those feelings get expressed and help people process their feelings and opinions.

If you're a filmmaker, and every time you finish a film, you just naturally go, 'Oh, I could have done so much better,' that's not much fun, is it, really? You might as well go pick another profession if that really is how you derive satisfaction from it.

Then I went through a whole bunch of crap with my lousy movies and pop records. I had people behind me kind of steering me in that direction, but it wasn't really my bag.

In the eyes of those lovers of perfection, a work is never finished - a word that for them has no sense - but abandoned; and this abandonment, whether to the flames or to the public (and which is the result of weariness or an obligation to deliver) is a kind of an accident to them, like the breaking off of a reflection, which fatigue, irritation, or something similar has made worthless.

It's a curse. I ask God to take this away from me all the time. I do not like being an artist.

I didn't know I was a good director, and I mean that sincerely. I had done a film a long time ago called 'Cold Around the Heart.' Nobody saw it, and it didn't turn out the way I wanted to.

The way I feel about every book is this: you don't finish it, you abandon it. All of my books have in some sense failed, otherwise I wouldn't write another one. If I wrote the perfect book, I wouldn't have to write again, and I wouldn't want to. That's not true for everyone, but it's true for me. I could walk away then. But so far I haven't managed to do it.

If I'm not directing it, I need to be right in the director's ear so we can be talking about this." You do something like use the wrong music, the tone's off, and everything feels off". And I was like, "I'm not going down with this one. I wrote it, but I don't like that play." Then I thought, "Well, no one's producing my stuff, letting me star in it, and direct it at these theaters, so I'll just do them in comedy clubs."

I am tired of starring in those films where I am being a part just for the sake of it.

Attempting to write vocal oriented songs to me felt like going through the motions and if you are going to go through the motions you might as well just do any gig that caused you to do repetitive motions like banging a hammer or serving fries.

The problem is I don't have respect for the films I make after I've made them. I detach myself and get embarrassed when I watch them later.

When you finish a film, you never want to see it again.

After playing with Rob Zombie, I was ready to go, 'OK, this is as far as I'm taking this bass-playing thing. This is the end of the road.' I was ready to kind of hang it up.

I have some songs on 'Tha Carter V,' but if I hear a song five times, I don't like it no more.