Quotes about Artistry

I'm not in a race with anybody to make the biggest hit movie anymore. I am just trying to tell stories that I can stay interested in for the two years it takes me to supervise the writing and to direct them.

If the choice is between doing something supercool and having no one hear it and doing something equally cool and tricking people into putting it on the radio, I don't think the second option is some big sellout.

Very often, it's the director that I'm attracted to. If it's a really good director, I don't even have to read the script to say yes.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

Drag was not only my introduction to womanhood, but my introduction to entertainment. It was the first time I realized that I could move a crowd.

Over the years, I've realized that I have as much in common with the performance artist, the standup comedian, the screenwriter, as I do with the theologian. I'm in an odd world where I make things and share them with people.

There are a lot of directors I'd still love to work with. Paul Thomas Anderson is someone I'd love to work with. I think Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is very talented. Ang Lee is very talented. I mean, there are a lot of people. There are many great directors out there.

The effort to see things without distortion takes something like courage and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he saw it for the first time.

I also tell them that sometimes when my writer friends are working, they feel better and more alive than they do at any other time. And sometimes when they are writing well, they feel that they are living up to something. It is as if the right words, the true words, are already inside them, and they just want to help them get out.

While others who have something to say or who want to be effectual, like musicians or baseball players or politicians, have to get out there in front of people, writers, who tend to be shy, get to stay home and still be public. There are many obvious advantages to this. You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away.

I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?

The reason you might choose to embrace the artist within you now is that this is the path to (cue the ironic music) security.