Creative Judgment Quotes

No one in Hollywood really knows what a good idea is before a movie hits the screens. We only know if it's a good idea after it's done.

You can't write drunk.

My dad told me, 'Your movie's never as good as the dailies and never as bad as the rough cut.

Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.

I've liked all the directors I've worked with a lot. And the ones I like best are the ones that have really good taste about what take was best.

I don't consider that I have to judge any of the movies I make all the time, but people are always asking me, 'What's your favorite movie?' And I never know what to say.

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Any attempt to list the ten best science fiction novels is doomed to failure.

Allow the artist to finish the piece of work before you critique it.

People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

I think that's why often people in creative fields can feel so alone is because there's a constant third eye, that constant watcher.

Doing what we do [filming], you have to be your own critic and judge and adjudicate as to what you do and how it turned out.

I think everyone agrees First Contact was our best film, and even at that, they're kind of... I don't know, they're sort of movies. But they're kind of really Star Trek movies, if you take my meaning. It's hard for me to say. I was glad to be doing them. Whether they were good isn't really up to me to determine, and it doesn't matter what I think. I thought we had a really nice script on Nemesis, and the audience didn't seem to care for it, so what can you do?

I have a soft spot for art that, in terms of subject matter and material, is in bad taste.

Sometimes you get the cynical person saying, 'Do we really need another book set in Nazi Germany?' But I think you just have to ask, 'Is this a story worth telling?'

I'm more critical of the films I make than anyone else.

Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.

To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole.

Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul.

I think when I'm 80 years old, 85, hopefully, I'll be pushed around in a wheelchair by a red-headed nurse with panty outline. She'll make me little tequila sunrises and I'll read my complete works then. Then, I'll decide whether I think I've done something good or not. I'll reserve my judgment until then.

I'm a musician and, just as the critics are hard on me, I'm hard on the critics.

My parameter of judging a script has not changed over the years. I still go for a script where the story interests me. Yes, there are times where I might go wrong; say, out of five scripts, I might go wrong on one.

When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it

I find people who prejudge reality TV to be annoying. Art comes from anywhere. Culture can ooze out of any crack. Prejudging is the death of creativity.