I was privileged to be able to study a year with Martha Graham, the last year she was teaching.
I am magnetically drawn to images, whether they’re paintings, photographs, film, or video. They are all lodestones of inspiration to me.
Too much planning implies you’ve got it all under control. That’s boring, unrealistic, and dangerous.
In Hollywood, an adventure movie with two guys doesn’t quite qualify as an idea. Two guys and a bear does. It adheres to the unshakable rule that you don’t have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas.
When Homer composed the Iliad and Odyssey, he was drawing on centuries of history and folklore handed down by oral tradition. When Nicolas Poussin painted The Rape of the Sabine Women, he was re-creating Roman history. When Marcel Proust dipped his petites madeleines into his tea, the taste and aroma set off a flood of memories and emotions from which modern literature has still not recovered.
Do them anyway – you can never spend enough time on the basics.
The goal is to connect with something old so it becomes new. Look and imagine.
Remember at all times that you’re the one who’ll be judged by the final product.
Reading is your first line of defense against an empty head.
Better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.
There’s nothing wrong with fear; the only mistake is to let it stop you in your tracks.
Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable.
Planning lets you impose order on the chaotic process of making something new, but when it’s taken too far you get locked into a status quo, and creative thinking is about breaking free from the status quo, even from one you made yourself.
Like creativity, collaboration is a habit – and one I encourage you to develop.
We want our artists to take the mundane materials of our lives, run it through their imaginations, and surprise us.
Movement stimulates our brains in ways we don’t appreciate.
Another thing about knowing who you are is that you know what you should not be doing, which can save you a lot of heartaches and false starts if you catch it early on.
The real secret of creativity is to go back and remember.
They key is to learn how to keep free-floating fears from paralyzing you before you’ve begun.
Michelangelo is celebrated for the Sistine Chapel; in fact, he supervised a dozen unacknowledged assistants. Even one of the greatest composers, Johann Sebastian Bach, chose to deflect credit for his compositions, writing at the bottom of each of his pieces “SDG,” for Soli Deo Gloria – to God alone the glory. By.
Without passion, all the skill in world won’t lift you above your craft.