Creative Frustration Quotes

I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't interested in ideas. The English, I'm afraid, are totally brainless.

My greatest regret as a writer is that I've never been able to include as many jokes as I'd like.

I remember rehearsing it, and it was the one that we were really excited about and thought would sound the best, and once it was down on tape, it was like, This doesn't actually sound that good.

Once I had left 'Twin Peaks' and started doing other shows and other movies, I kept running into, 'No, no, we can't do it this way. This is the way it has to happen.' I'm like, 'No. I've already done it, and it worked, so I don't understand what you're saying.'

That was one of the big problems when I was at Harvard studying music. We had to write choral pieces in the style of Brahms or Mendelssohn, which was distressing because in the end you realized how good Brahms is, and how bad you are.

I don't know if I've got the capacity for all of the creativity that I want to put out there, which is annoying and frustrating - it's kinda like torture.

Sometimes you meet people that try to explain to you your work, and how to write a song and how to sing it, and they explain that you are doing it the wrong way. And yeah, it's always super frustrating.

I think the music business is as crass and as unrewarding as it has ever been.

I've never loved composing, because I feel like other people do it better.

It was like I had evolved to a certain stage where I was stuck in this songwriter bag as an image. But basically at heart, I'm a rocker. And I still am. But I was caught up in the singer/songwriter bag and I wasn't really enjoying it.

I thought I had swell ideas, and wonderful musicians, but the hell of it, no one else did.

I'm never happy with my work. I always go back home thinking I could have done so so much better.

When The Who first started, we were playing blues, and I dug the blues and I knew what I was supposed to be playing, but I couldn't play it. I couldn't get it out. I knew what I had to play; it was in my head. I could hear the notes in my head, but I couldn't get them out on the guitar.

Usually, I work every day, seven days a week. When I go three days without writing, my body aches with anxiety; my mood is irritable. My night dreams grow wild with unconscious invention.

I wish I could write music notation. Even if I couldn't play it, I wish I could just write it.

It's hard to make music knowing that it's not going to be received by the listener in the way that it should be.

I think we have a responsibility to shape the zeitgeist with the movies we put out there. Because 'After Earth' isn't going to do it. 'The Expendables 3' isn't going to do it. You could make one million amazing films for the amount of money they spend on those films. I get frustrated.

I frustrate myself as a writer. There are certain things that I'll think, 'Well, that would be really fun to play... if somebody else was playing this character.'

The most disappointing thing to me after 'Tusk' was the politics in the band. They said, 'We're not going to do that again.' I felt dead in the water from that. On 'Mirage,' I was treading water, saying, 'Okay, whatever,' and taking a passive role.

Finding your place as an artist is the hardest thing. You come out of college with what feels like a Mickey Mouse degree that qualifies you for nothing in the real world.

There've been moments where I just was tired of being in L.A. It was very difficult. I mean, you're constantly rejected. And that's OK, it's just really frustrating for me, because I try to read scripts and projects that have really great, deeper, meaningful qualities to them.

I gave everything I ever wrote to Johnny Cash. I think he said later in some interview that he would take them home and throw them in the lake with all the other demos. I'm sure he got a million of them.

La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fe" le o u' nous battons des me lodies a' faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les e toiles. Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.

I'd always hoped to write the story as a novel, but there was a long period when the [Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries] movie was stalled and in confusion. I felt frustrated creatively, and just couldn't work on the Baby material till the movie was sorted out.

When I draw something, the incredibly annoying thing is that it doesn't come out like I pictured.