Creative Clarity Quotes

An artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way

There was a big drive when I was at art school to make you aware of the economy of meaning - after all, this was still during the tail end of minimalism. Being responsible for everything you put in your picture, and being able to defend it. Keeping everything clear around you so you know what is operating. To open the wound and keep it clean.

It's tricky to ask a filmmaker to explain his own work; usually we're the least qualified to make sense of what we've done, unfortunately, because of the tunnel vision required to create anything over four years.

For me, when I 'discover' a story, there is a feeling of buoyancy and clarity, perhaps similar to early morning out on a prairie highway, when darkness lifts and reveals the outline of farmhouses and copses of trees in the distance.

I think you really have to know what you want if you want to be an artist. Otherwise, you just kind of end up in space, just floating around.

Sharing the same vision for what's on the page is always a good idea. The director's job is to establish what that is and make sure that everyone sticks to it when it comes down to actually executing it. Establishing what the vision is and being able to stick to it is the job, and everyone should be on the same page going in.

Cinema, which is influenced by every single part of life, is direct and reaches you immediately. And writing - the best writing is complex ideas communicated concisely. And music - if it's a good tune, make sure people can bloody hear it.

God would have to beam into me what I was doing and what the album actually sounded like because usually when I start a project like that, I already know what the album sounds like before I start it.

If you're trying to do multiple agendas, you'll confuse yourself as a storyteller. If you have one purpose, everything else will fall into place.

I've always wrestled with the difference between plot and structure, and after re-reading a lot of writing books I realized I wasn't alone.

It's really weird because my house is very ornate, but my writing lair is very, very blank. It's white, the furniture is white. It gives me nothing to look at, so I just have to concentrate!

As regards my means of expression, I try my hardest to achieve the maximum of clarity, power, and plastic aggressiveness; a physical sensation to begin with, followed up by an impact on the psyche.

Lucidity is the first purpose of color in music.

Like the eagle, we (artists) must be able to see clearly.

Rock & roll is not obscure, it's really easy to understand. So is my painting.

The Class Clown album was done totally sober. I'd realized what a hell I'd made for myself and I cleaned up completely for three months. You can hear the clarity of my thinking and of my speech on that album.

One thing I'm super aware of in my music when I'm writing is: 'Am I overcomplicating this?' I'll write a song about some deep existential quandary and explore all these dumb thought waves, and then think 'Is it effective to say that? Or is it effective to say one simple thing that communicates the feeling better?'

There's no writer's block; there's only distraction.

That's the thing about great artists: They find the thing that's most obvious to themselves, what's most conscious and natural, and they put it out there and the audience comes.

Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He copies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He’s convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.

I must always have a clear image of the form of a work before I begin. Otherwise there is no impulse to create.

Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand.

I'd like to think that most of what I do is self-evident if you're listening to it or seeing it. But I don't mind the fact that it's hard to describe.

Before I wasn't sure what I wanted to say, but now, I have had so many different experiences that they have given me what I want to get across in my music.

The thing about running is, if I run in the morning before work, I feel like I'm ahead of the day. Whatever work I've done in terms of preparation or research or thinking about the scene or the character, it all kind of crystallizes in that moment in the morning. And sometimes I have the best ideas then.