Quotes

I. Being

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.

Stop looking for what you want.

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it... but love it.

I am completely uninterested in your opinions of what is or is not possible. This is computer science. There aren’t restrictions. I can do anything I want. It’s just bits.

What is it that I really like?

II. Understanding

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

For so many different things in the world, if you just look closer, it’s so much more than you could have ever imagined.

In all life, when a thing works better, usually it is more beautiful to the eye.

There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful.

The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

I believe your sound comes from within you. You can manufacture a sound by having a wah-wah pedal or something, but the actual sound comes from you. You know, if you have a piano sitting out in the lounge, and Ray Charles is playing it, he’s going to sound like Ray Charles. If Elton John is playing it, he’s going to sound like Elton. My point is that it’s your touch and your soul that makes it sound the way it does.
Now, you don’t want to play like B.B. King or somebody else. You want to be you. So what you do is listen to me and anybody else you like. I won’t use the word ‘steal’, but try to ‘borrow’ a little bit from each guy. And, like that, you become you.

Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own.

I feel I have been a lot of different people. Many people have sat at this typewriter, using my fingers. Writing my books.
My books are forgeries. Nobody wrote them. The goddamn typewriter wrote them; it’s a magic typewriter. Or like John Denver gets his songs: I get them from the air. Like his songs, they — my books — are already there. Whatever that means.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.
It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart.
The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

III. Doing

Do it your way.

Don’t just talk about it.

The most effective way to do it, is to do it.

Don’t play the butter notes.

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn’t matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over.

Always decide your next project before the opening of your movie. When you’re busy, there’s a shorter distance from your heart to your hand.

Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.

If you forget a good idea, you wanna commit suicide. So you have to write them down.

My idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around and sticks around. A writer’s notebook is the best way in the world to immortalize bad ideas.

I’m just in love with making movies. I’m not very fond of movies; I don’t go to them much. I think it’s very harmful for movie makers to see movies because you either imitate them or worry about not imitating them. You should make movies innocently, the way Adam named the animals on the first day in the garden.
[...]
I don’t believe in learning from other people’s films. You should learn from your own interior vision and discover, as I say, innocently, as though there had never been D.W. Griffith, Eisenstein, Ford, Renoir, or anybody.
[...]
The more virgin our eyes are, the more we have to say. The most detestable habit in all modern cinema is the homage. I don’t want to see another goddamn homage in anybody’s movie. There are enough of them which are unconscious.
Now, of course, you must see films, and you must see great films. I said don’t be marinated, don’t soak yourself in films.

Your material is not in the newspapers or the TV shows and the books and the manga. Your material is essentially yourself. You have to study yourself and not movies, although of course you will study movies. But you have to study what it is that is making you think you might need to write or tell a story or paint or sing a song.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

If it’s important, do it every day. If it’s not important, don’t do it at all.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.