Creative Excess Quotes

I'm a painter, I'm an artist. I take things too far sometimes. I really need some comfort.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

The faults of great authors are generally excellences carried to an excess.

For a while, I Photoshopped too much. When you first learn what you can do, you really go overboard sometimes.

One of the marks of true genius is a quality of abundance. A rich, rollicking abundance, enough to give indigestion to ordinary people. Great artists turn it out in rolls, in swatches. They cover whole ceilings with paintings, they chip out a mountainside in stone, they write not one novel but a shelf full. It follows that some of their work is better than other. As much as a third of it may be pretty bad. Shall we say this unevenness is the mark of their humanity - of their proud mortality as well as of their immortality?

The extravagance of intellect outstrips the extravagance of desire.

History is rife with stories of directors who got so obsessed that their films went massively over budget - out of control.

I like to write with a lot of emotion and a lot of power. Sometimes I overdo it; sometimes my prose is a little bit too purple, and I know that.

There's a really fine line between artistic license and artistic licentiousness. And history is a lousy filmmaker. It doesn't give you all the ingredients you need. No story will quite fulfill that three-act structure.

In Paris, you couldn't really turn around without seeing the result of lovers' bad decisions. An artist given to sexual excess was almost a cliché, but no one seemed to mind. As long as you were making something good or interesting or sensational, you could have as many lovers as you wanted and ruin them all.