Creative Burden Quotes

I start thinking about the next movie before it's a success, so I can never have one moment of happiness or peace. I'm instantly thinking about the next one.

Now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden on the creative process.

Songwriting is what I do, and there could be worse burdens to carry.

One day, I started writing, not knowing that I had chained myself for life to a noble but merciless master. When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation... I'm here alone in my dark madness, all by myself with my deck of cards - and, of course, the whip God gave me.

Honestly speaking, it's not easy to reprise someone else's role.

You win an Oscar, and the movie that comes after that is always going to be compared.

Songwriting isn't a choice. You're either called upon to bear the burden, or you're not. It's not all fun and games.

Being beautiful can be a curse, especially if you want to be an artist and create.

There are so many great artists, I think, who kind of suffer from being icons, legends, acknowledged masters.

The saving grace of all really great gifts is that the persons who bear their burden remain superior to what they have done, at least as long as the source of creativity is alive.

You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.

For a long time, I've had a recurring dream - I dream I don't have to write any more, that I'm free. I'm not free, alas; I'm still clearing the same terrain, with the impression that it's never finished.

I think there are ways to get so caught up in your career and being so heavy and dramatic, and everyone wants to be a tortured genius.

The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility; that is my burden. And even I grow tired.

As a director, I have to do everything. As an actor, I'm just worried about one role, that's it. As a director, everything is important. Everything is something you have to be very detailed and specific about in telling a story. So for me, the job is far greater than just being the actor, there's a lot more responsibility creatively, technically.

I can imagine the writers of China, England and France, crippled and unsure of themselves when they feel that the ghosts of Confucius, Mencius, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Victor Hugo are looking over their shoulders.

I think the stakes are always high when you're an artist of color - to get things right, to get things perfect and make everybody happy.

Fiction writing is a twenty-four-hou r-a-day occupation. You never leave your work behind. It is always with you, and to some extent, you are always thinking about it. You don't take your work home; your work never leaves home. It lives inside you. It resides and grows and comes alive in your mind.

Musical types tend to combine the burden of the author with the burden of the actor.

It's very easy to get excited about a job, but it's a big commitment because you do it and then you have to live with it when it's finished. It's forever in your section in the video store. It's you. It's almost like deciding who you have a child with.

It was a high-class problem burden, but it was still a burden on 'The Vampire Diaries,' in which we had this group of characters that we loved writing for so much and who had so much available story to tell.

Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.

No writer can really sustain two huge - I hate the word 'franchises.'

I wouldn't want to direct. I see how much work it is.

I've enjoyed being a famous writer-except that every once in a while you have to write something.