American Quotes

When I ask for help with my creativity, I get it.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise.

My new house has a deck that wraps around my writing room; my writing room has many windows, and outside the windows I've hung bird feeders... for enticing different species. So I imagine I will be writing about that.

Love is the substance of all life. Everything is connected in love, absolutely everything.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

I believe that when we ask to be led, we are led, and there's nothing too small or esoteric for spiritual help.

Creativity is always a leap of faith. You're faced with a blank page, blank easel, or an empty stage.

Because if you're trying to write and you have unlimited time, you can procrastinate an unlimited account, but if you have limited time, you rush to the page trying to get something down in the little bit of fragment of time that you have, and you may write a great deal that way.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite - getting something down.

Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough - that we should try again.

I have learned, as a rule of thumb, never to ask whether you can do something. Say, instead, that you are doing it. Then fasten your seat belt. The most remarkable things follow.

Each of us has an inner dream that we can unfold if we will just have the courage to admit what it is. And the faith to trust our own admission. The admitting is often very difficult.

Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness.

What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do. When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us.

Growth is an erratic forward movement: two steps forward, one step back. Remember that and be very gentle with yourself.

The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.

What are you gonna do, talk the alien to death?

There is a hugely underserved population out there... those who are the least capable of paying pay the highest.

The magic doesn't come from within the director's mind, it comes from within the hearts of the actors.

The films that influenced me were so disparate that there's almost no pattern.

So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We'll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world.

My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer.

It'll be all of our efforts together. It won't won't ever be exactly the way I imagined it. And that is, I think, an important lesson as well, is that in any group enterprise it's going to be the sum total of the group.

It took me a long time to realize that you have to have a bit of an interlanguage with actors. You have to give them something that they can act with.

If you wait until the right time to have a child you'll die childless, and I think film making is very much the same thing. You just have to take the plunge and just start shooting something even if it's bad.

I watched a couple of really bad directors work, and I saw how they completely botched it up and missed the visual opportunities of the scene when we had put things in front of them as opportunities. Set pieces, props and so on.

I was always fascinated by engineering. Maybe it was an attempt maybe to get my father's respect or interest, or maybe it was just a genetic love of technology, but I was always trying to build things.

I lived in a small town. It was 2,000 people in Canada. A little river that went through it and we swam in the - you know, there was a lot of water around. Niagara Falls was about four or five miles away.

I had pictured myself as a filmmaker but I had never pictured myself as a director if that makes any sense at all.