I've never been a very prolific person, so when creativity flows, it flows. I find myself scribbling on little notepads and pieces of loose paper, which results in a very small portion of my writings to ever show up in true form.
You're only as good as your body of work, and everybody has issues, whether it's Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese. I'm not comparing myself to those guys, but you learn more from the misses than the hits.
Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals.
It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.
Art imitating life and life imitating art, and it's beyond the job - it will always be a marked period in my life.
I don't really like watching my work. I don't mind watching it when I was a little kid because I forgive myself a lot, since I was a little kid.
I feel I'm all over my movies. I know my movies are all over me.
Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.
Writing screenplays makes me a better musician because it clears my head. After writing a movie, I go running back to music as fast as I can.
How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?
Art is a way of recognizing oneself.
Perhaps the least cheering statement ever made on the subject of art is that life imitates it.
I would think, as an artist, it's inescapable that you'll be affected by the world around you.
Going off the grid is always good for me. It's the way that I've started books and finished books and gotten myself out of deadline dooms and things.
It's tricky to ask a filmmaker to explain his own work; usually we're the least qualified to make sense of what we've done, unfortunately, because of the tunnel vision required to create anything over four years.
I don't watch a lot of my work. I'm not really interested in seeing it after I do it. Because I came from theater, where, you know, it's impossible to actually review your work, so why would I bother under any other circumstances?
When I'm writing a book, I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result.
All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.
I do love being in my studio. Especially at night.
As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality. It should make our days holy to us. The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
Art is a game only if you playat it, a mirror that reflects from the inside out.
Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.
There was a time when I thought I turned terrible things over in my mind because I read and wrote too many scary stories. (Note self: start writing about unicorns and bunnies)
But then I go through long periods where I don't listen to things, usually when I'm working. In between the records and in between the writing I suck up books and music and movies and anything I can find.
I try to think of it not as writer's block, but a time where you just need to live life and experience things so you have something to write about.
