Creative Life Quotes

At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn’t possible to save mankind.

One of the great joys of a creative life is that your observations and loose moments aren’t lost forever; they live in your work.

I believe that my whole creative life stemmed from this magic hour under the stars on that hilltop.

I really don’t know where my interest in death comes from. Maybe I’ve just got a twisted imagination. The truth is, I haven’t had a hugely eventful life – maybe I’m compensating in my creative life. Or maybe I’m just a bit sick.

I was one of those kids who looks really good on paper, I tested very well, I went to a fancy college, won some prizes. When I came out of school, I had many horrible jobs, but I didn’t know what the path was to a creative life or the life of a writer.

When anyone starts out to do something creative – especially if it seems a little unusual – they seek approval, often from those least inclined to give it. But a creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism – you learn this as you go on.

I want to be really clear about something: I think we kind of fetishize the creative life. We have the vision of what it means to be an author, where you sit in your garret or looking out at your view and you give everything to your art and you commit fully to it. But the reality is that most of us have bills to pay.

As a writer of both novels and screenplays, I can say that screenwriting is a vastly rewarding creative life – if you fight hard enough to do it on your own terms. Whether I write books or not, my screenwriting life has been creatively rewarding and remains so.

My idea in terms of managing a narrative, or in thinking in my creative life, is that you could easily argue that the past, the present and the future all occur simultaneously, and if you can postulate that, then you’re not strictly bound to a linear narrative.

The momentum of my creative life and intellectual growth is still the momentum of breaking out of fundamentalism. Because of that, I’m very grateful for it. But I’m also grateful that at the center of it was something that I still believe to be true – those fundamentals of faith.

I realised as a teenager that I was destined for a creative life and found that fashion design was something I enjoyed and was a potentially successful career path.

My hope is that one day I’ll be able to work and have a quieter life, but still a creative life.

I am tapping into a place in you that is unexplored, and very dangerous, but I think essential to the creative life of an artist.

I was quite satisfied with my creative life. I’ve always had reinforcement from a small but devoted readership.

I get lonely – I’m not going to lie about that… I kind of signed up in my mind that I’m giving myself wholeheartedly, full-throttle to my creative life, and I don’t want to be distracted.

Work infuses my whole life. My creative life is my real life, so it’s hard to separate.

I am always talking to students and telling them how you have to practice every day because you can’t wait for someone to hire you. You need something you do for yourself, something that feeds your creative life.

Becoming a writer, and then a director, was taking my creative life in my own hands, and wanting to have stories that I wanted to put out into the world – and I have fallen in love with directing.

Collaboration is a vital part of my creative life. I’ve had success with Guy Clark and Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash.

When it comes to your creative life and what it’s going to take, you will do a disservice to everybody if you just dabble.

In my creative life, David Bowie is definitely an enormous influence on me, being one of rock’s greatest shapeshifters.

Being a screenwriter is not enough for a full creative life.

The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls – women’s normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life.

The truth is that wreaths have never really been part of my creative life. I like them and want them and know how to do them.

The possibility of being as free with the camera as we are with the pen is a fantastic prospect for the creative life of the 21st century.

Fame is part of me and my life as an actor. I enjoy the creative aspects of my life as an actor. I enjoy directing and acting as well. But the bottom line for me is not prestige and power. It’s about having an exciting, creative life.

It took me a long time to even dare to envision myself as a writer. I was very uncertain and hesitant and afraid to pursue a creative life.

All my life I’ve had the privilege to make my living with my imagination, and the most important thing has been to see my creative life grow. I was educated to do that and have lived accordingly.

Over the course of my creative life, I’ve trafficked in broken, heroic mothers.

I’ve had the thought that a person’s ‘artistic vision’ is really just the cumulative combination of whatever particular stances he has sincerely occupied during his creative life – even if some of those might appear contradictory.