Creative Distraction Quotes

I think, on both sides of the camera or the novel: Distraction. I'm obsessed with: Can I get this actress or my third act to work? I'm distracted. I'm interested in that so I don't sit home and think, "Gee, life is meaningless. We're all going to die. The universe is pulling apart at breakneck speed."

An artist is always thinking of something else. My father was like that. He had this feeling of abstraction, and I do, too.

The process of making films is so technically demanding that it's a distraction. You don't spend your time thinking about the philosophical content, which is often very depressing.

I always was songwriting in high school, writing songs while I was supposed to be listening to the teacher.

There's an infinite amount of possibilities and detours and things that can distract you from actually just performing the song and having whatever emotion that's invested into the song come through in the recording.

When I was doing 'The Prime Gig' with Vince, we played around so much that the director separated us like children!

I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel.

For an artiste like me, it was very difficult to focus on studies with a beautiful campus around me.

I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can't afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.

A musician can get lost to what he is in the session busines as it was.

I wish I could be a better writer, but writing is so difficult. I get seduced by visual aesthetics. Because I just like making beautiful pictures, sometimes I wander away from making a clear statement.

When you're a creative person, there are just times when you're not listening. You know, I could be looking right at you and thinking about something else.

Producing films was a distraction for me for which I payed dearly.

Writers shouldn't have lives that are interesting. It gets in the way of your work.

Everything about filmmaking tries to distract you from that first fine rapturous vision you have of the film.

I like movies. I've written screenplays as a sort of procrastination thing for me. Like I'll work for a couple months on this idea that's been kicking around and then like 30 pages in I'll just go try a novel because it's a lot easier. That's what I know. So why am I killing myself?

I was never very good at stopping crowds. I started blowing bubbles to attract people.

I think, as far as branching out with acting, it would take something really right on the mark to distract me from music, because music is everything to me.

The poet or storyteller who feels that he is competing with a superb double play in the World Series is a lost man. One would not want as a reader a man who did not appreciate the finesse of a double play.

I have things I watch in my downtime - I love 'Scandal.' I don't write political romance, so there's not a direct relation there. But it's something I do just to turn off the brain for a little bit, and just to relax and recharge.

[A businessmen in plane after 9\11] asked me, "What are you working on now?" And I said I was writing a story about a mouse who tries to save a princess. I was mortified. Here the world is falling down around us, and I'm trying to tell the story about a mouse who saves a princess. I said "It doesn't matter at all now."

I went to see 'The Piano' with Holly Hunter when I was in a Paula Vogel play, and I was just gone. I couldn't focus at all. It took that creative part of my brain with it so absolutely.

Ideas are the easy part. I spend a lot of time batting them away, trying to keep them from distracting me from what I actually have to focus on and finish. A lot of times, they are a siren temptress beckoning me with the promise of a much shorter, simpler, more slender novel over the horizon, but of course that's very dangerous.

But with my last film, Spider it was agony. The money was always disappearing, nobody got paid, it was very difficult - and it's very distracting from the process of making the movie, of course. So I think things have been getting harder and harder.