Creative Struggles Quotes

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.

It took five years to get 'Parental Guidance' made, and it was a fight every second.

Making movies is a hard thing, and it's slow. So you can glorify the product, but the process is difficult no matter who you are.

Television tends to be a more difficult medium for me to get my head around sometimes when it comes to certain things I get offered.

I don't deal with writer's block, I don't allow myself to believe that there is such a thing. I think that there are good days and a lot more less good days.

We all have our insecurity and that's normal. And you have to learn to accept that about being an artistic person or aspiring to be an artistic person is that fears and insecurity, they don't go away.

I don't mean that creative people are somehow finer, or more sensitive, and thus have finer, more sensitive nervous breakdowns - you can save that horseshit for the Sylvia Plath worshipers. It's just that creative people have creative breakdowns.

There was nothing glorious about the life of a drinker or the life of a writer.

I'm exceedingly proud of being an actor, but I never recommend it to anyone.

When I was at Marvel, they were in bankruptcy, which is hard to believe now with 'Avengers 2' out, but it was during the 1990s. It was a troubled place. Comic book sales were dropping. Work was scattered.

I'll always stand by the first 'Batman'. Even for its imperfections, people will never know how hard that movie was to do. A lot of that still holds up.

I think it's just an awkward time right now to be a musician.

After I was fired from Disney, I did some of the worst movies ever made.

I don't like seeing the stuff that's not polished. It's harder for me to step away from it and watch that.

I know a lot of artists and chefs don't talk about this, but sometimes you just don't get to the finish line. That honesty and tenderness is something we're kind of not supposed to express.

There's a period where you feel very hinky and low about yourself, like, 'That was a lot of time, and there's nothing to show for it.' I've tried to tell myself that if you're going to be a filmmaker, you can't really talk like that about time, because you'll hate yourself or feel very worthless.

Actors wait tables, directors work at video stores.

Never, if you can possibly help it, write a novel. It is, in the first place, a thoroughly unsocial act. It makes one obnoxious to one's family and to one's friends. One sits about for many weeks, months, even years, in the worst cases, in a state of stupefaction.

Inevitably any series that goes on too long will reach a point where it starts struggling for ideas, so I've always been really aware of getting out while the going's good.

You can work on an album forever, but finishing it is a whole different deal.

I don't think my story is an unusual story for a lot of music performers. But I think that since 1982, worldwide, I have probably seen less than 3,000 American dollars in royalties.

I don't write a great song every day. I don't write a great song every couple weeks. It comes in such random times.

When you are a writer, the assist-to-turnover ratio... there are a lot more turnovers than assists.

Usually, I create tunes that are fragmented. I think the biggest obstacle for people with their creativity is that they feel they have to sit down and create this finished, polished product.

The same issue is happening on a show like Everybody Loves Raymond now, which is in its eighth year and struggling to come up with good stories. It'll be interesting to see how they do. The bottom line is, it starts with the writers and ends with the writers.