When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.
The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.
The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art.
You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.
Being pigeonholed is the death of all actors.
You cannot just be working in a vast, air-conditioned loft space and think you are going to make a decent painting. Francis Bacon had a special studio built, and he felt completely emasculated in there. I have to be somewhere comfortable.
If life has given us no more than a prison cell, let's at least decorate it as best we can-with the shadows of our dreams, their colourful patterns engraving our oblivion on the static surface of the walls.
People ask, "Do you enjoy acting?" But you only have those specific few hours to do a scene, and then you drive home and wait for six months to find out how it went. You can't go back and put in a new idea. Filming is about continuing to be alert and to think, and I find it quite exhausting. Certainly I would say that fear is a part of that.
I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.
When you write for a living and you can't do anything else, you know that sooner or later that the deadline is going to come screaming down on you like a goddamn banshee. There's no avoiding it...So one day you just don't appear at the El Adobe bar anymore; you shut the door, paint the windows black, rent an electric typewriter and become the monster you always were - the writer.
But when you get to know a character so well, you start to have insights that you can't show because you're confined to your script of your hit show.
Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing.
I found fame to be somewhat of a prison. The more famous you were, the smaller the cell that you had to live in.
I just don't think it's good to be around too much creative energy other than your own.
Something about 'Battlestar' that I didn't realize when I took the job was this whole bubble aspect of closing people in and seeing what they do.
When you work this intensely on something, the recording process becomes a bit like cabin fever. I shut everything out and, for a while, I totally lost perspective. To an outsider, I imagine the whole recording process sounds like torture.
I'm glowing in the dark with my studio tan. I've been in a cave of music for months and months and months.
After having been confined to a television series - and it's a luxury job - where you can't play anything but one particular character for nine months out of the year, it will make you insane. It didn't affect me. I got out quick enough.
I'm a victim of my metaphors.
When I type 'The End,' it's like being paroled from prison.
The most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.
The reason that chefs become chefs is that they're not allowed into rooms with windows.
Many of the greatest composers and musicians do their best work in extreme confinement but we are seeing it in other fields - uses of technology to link people together in networks to solve problems and almost certainly we'll get better ideas than we would from them just doing it on their own.
We are most artistically caged.
I feel an image is a creeping jail growing all around you without you even realising it. Suddenly, you are trapped, and an actor should never be trapped.
