Creative Relief Quotes

All my life, I've really enjoyed music: making music, playing it, and recording it. It's such a relief and a joy to do what I do for a living.

I've never been one for late nights, which is why I have always preferred making films to theatre. A play takes over your life: you start to feel sick at lunchtime, and by mid-afternoon, you're wishing for a bomb scare so the whole thing will be called off. Of course, if the evening goes well and you get the applause, then it's wonderful.

The Doors are perfect paintings; a relief from the picture world I’ve created for myself.

And when you see it the first time you put the film together, the roughest cut, is when you want to go home and open up your veins and get in a warm tub and just go away. And then it gradually, maybe, works its way back, somewhere toward that spot you were at before.

I think after a long tour and after an album, your brain feels like it wants to relax, but at the same time, making music for me is something that comes kind of naturally. Just like a brain process.

When I make a movie, I don't do any shows because the focus is completely on the film but when I take up a show, it's an absolute relief!

There's so many great songs already written, it's kind of really wonderful you don't have to write your own.

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

I never really got the book together for the thing, so I had all the songs and the characters. But by the time we'd gotten it on the road and I'd been doing it for 18 months, oh God, I couldn't wait to move on to something else.

Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.

When you're directing, you're right at the coal face, always exhausted, often emotional - and I'll enjoy being a couple of steps back from that and simply helping where I can.

I'm not a frustrated concert composer, and the concert pieces I've done have been a small part of my work. What I've sought there is instruction, variation from the demands of film and relief from its restrictions.

If I wasn't touring, I wasn't making money. When I got the MacArthur, I could get off that hamster wheel. It meant I didn't have to do anything.

There are endless anxieties in putting a film together, and it's an enormous relief when you know it's working with an audience.

I always get excited when I find out there's a sequel, because all the work is kind of done.

In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction - in which I'll include memoir, biography, and true crime - is that one relieves the other.

I think I've finally learned to stop worrying about how big the gaps are between my novels' publication.

There's always that relief you feel when you're working on your own series that you can actually make it to your planned ending and that your audience will still be there to support you - and that your publisher will still exist.

I love writing, and I love postproduction. That's great, because you start to reassemble the film, and you sit there, and you start to really put the film together, finally. The shooting of it is the most stressful part of the process.

The artist writes, paints, sings or dances the burden of some idea or feeling off his mind.

I can't express how wonderful it is to get feedback when you've been sort of in a bubble working on something and then you release it to the world and hope for the best. It's like the birth of a musical baby.

Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there's just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.

The network was fantastic, but you get a lot of anxiety with any production. It was very helpful to have both of us because we could back each other up. As a creator, a director and a filmmaker, you often get assaulted and you lose perspective because you have all of this pressure. It was so nice to call him and say, "What do you think?"

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

Sometimes what happens I think is that actors finish a movie and they go, oh my god, I'm never going to work again, even big huge actors, and so they'll take something thinking that something else will never come along. But for me, I freak out - because I'm a bit of a workaholic - the second I finish a movie going oh my god, what am I going to do, but I can start writing the next day so it doesn't force me to make a bad choice acting-wise.