I've always considered my work one piece and I consider that my work won't be finished until I am dead and buried and I hope that's a long, long time.
Writing a book is such a full-time job. If you're away for a few days, you have to start again.
I've established a certain voice over my albums. It can be an obstacle, but in the end, I think it's a strength, because I can build upon that voice, which is ultimately very much mine.
Movies and television show build on top of each other, succeed one another. In a large way, in terms of filmmaking aesthetics, they evolve because they can't help but be a consequence of all the movies and TV shows that came before it.
I think you get so wrapped up in the book you're currently writing, it's hard to think about anything else. But I know as soon as I'm done with this book, I'll move on to something else.
It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.
All of my favourite albums have this incredible amount of conceptual glue to them, even if they are not telling a story.
I don't have much of a problem with interruptions. I keep a detailed record of paint and materials as a work on each painting. I can restart exactly where I left off.
That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.
I've got a vibe going on with a lot of what I've been doing, and to completely change it based off of me having a child might be a little confusing. I'm sure as my life goes forward, and she starts growing up, there will be a lot more things to include in my music. But, at this point, I'm just sticking to what I do.
I have found that each of my books has developed out of something I have written in a previous book. Some thought evidently unfinished.
The thing is that I have a really intense, almost compulsive need to record. But it doesn't end there, because what I record is somehow transformed into a creative thing. There is a continuity. Recording is the beginning of a conceptual production. I am somehow collapsing the two - recording and producing - into a single event.
The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it's not like I'm writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it 'a novel,' it separates it from other books.
There's a need to keep the history of an artform going, parallel with the new work that's being done.
I never felt like I left, I think before anything I am a writer and that's something that I do almost everyday. So it wasnt I guess public,but I still would put out stuff on like MySpace or you know whatever social networks were poppin' at the time.
I never do any album to beat it. I do it to extend it.
Oftentimes, when a movie turns into a series, you never retain the creative auspices. You buy the idea, you buy the franchise, and then you bring in a whole new creative team and copy the tone or sensibility.
It's funny because I think, as a general rule, that people seem to think that if you do lots of different things over the course of, like, a timeline, it means that you kind of disregard what you did before. But that's not true of me. I still genuinely like everything I did as much as I liked it when I released it.
When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.
What I'm most pleased about is that there's no particular decline. The songs I wrote 40 years ago are no worse and no better - there's a consistency.
Once something is memorable, it's living and you're using it. That to me is the foundation of a creative society.
Every painting I do is related to the last one: it may be a continuation of a previous painting or it may be a reaction against it.
Absolutely, you rise and fall based on your creative team. I have continuity across different films that I've done. I was even fortunate enough to reach back and include people that had worked on Horton with me, as well.
The only happy artist is a dead artist, because only then you can't change. After I die, I'll probably come back as a paintbrush.
Theater is a lot more interactive, more of a cohesive unit. With television, it can be a different director every episode.
