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.

God punishes you by giving you everything you want.

What punishments of God are not gifts?

Don’t be overheard complaining, not even to yourself.

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?

I do not always know what I want, but I do know what I don’t want.

You’re born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Fate leads the willing, and drags along the reluctant.

The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.

Wear sunscreen.
[...]
Do one thing every day that scares you.
[...]
Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts. Don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.
[...]
Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself.
[...]
Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.
[...]
Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.
[...]
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

II. Understanding

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

Everything has already been done. Every story has been told. Every scene has been shot. It’s our job to do it one better.

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.

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.

The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.

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.

I never find a clock. But I lost a lot.

Human creativity is nature manifest in us.

A mother will have her baby just to hold it.

My role as a musician is to connect the ancient mythology and the future.

III. Doing

Do it your way.

Don’t just talk about it.

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

Either you care, or you don’t. There’s no in-between. And if you care, then go all of the way.

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader.

Don’t play the butter notes.

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 end of your current one. When you’re busy, there’s a shorter distance from your heart to your hand.

Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

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.

Never say no to an idea — you never know how that idea will ignite another idea.

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.

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

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.

I think that one of the problems with twentieth-century art is its preoccupation with subjectivity and originality at the expense of everything else. This has been especially true in painting and music. Though initially stimulating, this soon impeded the full development of any particular style, and rewarded uninteresting and sterile originality.

It’s impossible not to have influences. Some people try not to have them and it’s just completely ridiculous. There’s just no point. There’s a certain ego to be like: ‘I have no influences. I’m gonna sound like nobody.’ You don’t know better than everybody.

We’re pretty referential in what we do. Even if we try not to be, we can’t help it. So we find something we want to filter through ourselves, and then we sort of have to work backwards to try and un-plagiarize it. And that’s the part that requires the creativity. So we postpone the creativity for as long as possible, until it’s necessary.

Creative people have learned to tolerate that slight discomfort and anxiety we all experience when we haven’t solved a problem.

There are only two differences between the creative and the uncreative. The first is that the creative knows how to play. The second is that the creative always defers making decisions for as long as they are allowed.

It’s all I think about.

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.