I don't think the failure of one film means the end of your career.
Often with good sentiments we produce bad literature.
Nobody in Hollywood ever sets out to make a bad movie ever but about 99% of the time, that's what happens.
Over in Hollywood they almost made a great picture, but they caught it in time.
Anton Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times, trying to get it just right. He failed.
Lenin is an artist who has worked men, as other artists have worked marble or metals. But men are harder than stone and less malleable than iron. There is no masterpiece. The artist has failed. The task was superior to his capacities.
Everybody's waiting on the downfall of artists.
The director does not have anyone to blame but himself. He or she cannot hide behind anybody. If a film is a hit, everyone gets the credit, but if it flops, only the director can be blamed.
I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I'd draw a big ram's head, really messy. I'd never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman.
I've also shot plenty of films with very small audiences - 'The Sun Also Rises.' I love that film, but I didn't capture the imagination of the audience. I don't know why.
As long as I don't look down upon any characters, that's fine. The moment I do that - the moment I think I'm superior or that others are inferior - I'm finished as an artist and as a human being.
There are a lot of good actors who work forever and never make one good thing.
I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.
A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been.
It's very difficult to photograph an opera. And they messed up on it. It just wasn't there. And I don't blame the Gershwins for taking it away. Of course, if they had gotten the original company to have done it, it would have been very good.
Part of the elasticity that you need, in order to continue to try to create, is the foregone conclusion that not all of it is going to be fabulously successful. But it's all going to be part of a long lifetime body of experimentation.
I'm a bad artist. I'm lazy and untalented and bad.
A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.
In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman’s eyes. You have used up the years and they have used up you, and still, and still, you have not written the poem.
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
To me Art (poetry) is a continuous and continuing process and that when a man fails to write good poetry he fails to live fully or well.
He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]
He seems determined to make a trumpet sound like a tin whistle.
Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.
If art doesn't move people, then art has failed.
