Literature Interviews

“I discovered early on that I’m the kind of person that experiments and makes mistakes but then it’s all worth it because once in a blue moon it hits home.”

“To fight this game alone is actually every day a struggle. Sometimes you are not in the best shape. The biggest thing is that you must find in it a personal happiness.”

“I’ve learned not to look at sales reports. I used to, but if I had listened to sales reports at the beginning, I would have given up on things that are some of our biggest successes now.”

“In the moment when you’re designing a building, it’s the subject. One year later, when you just go back and see it, it’s the object. It becomes part of the city. It starts to sit where it should be sitting.”

“I want to be an authentic person. I start to feel that it’s a mission. I am not going to hold back on an opinion I have about something; I don’t know what the point of that would be.”

“There's going to be a moment where your work challenges you, where you’re at your limit… But if that deep love is really there, you're not going to abandon it. You are going to give your all to it!”

“When you keep yourself open, you just might get to know yourself and know the good things about yourself. And that's why I always come back to songwriting. It's the way I kind of try and make sense of my life.”

“I’m surviving. I do everything I can to speak out and make sure that I keep my humanity.”

“It was eye opening and an education really, a masterclass working with Martin Scorsese on Killers of the Flower Moon. That talent! Of course, you are in the presence of a master, working with him.”

“The first song that I wrote was the way of discovering if I could write a song. And after that one I knew that I understood the form. Everything after that became more personal.”

“I’m doing something that I love, and I consider that to be success. But if you think it’s gonna come fast or easy, then you probably are in for some rough times. You need to always be ready to throw things out and do it over again, and know that you love the process enough to be doing it repeatedly. Always be in love with the process and in love with your talent. And know that you’re going to keep doing it because it’s what you love doing.”

“I feel quite free as an artist. I don't feel that I have to prove anything. It’s a liberating feeling. I can go in any directions, I can explore and embrace whatever I want.”

“You’ve got to actually write it. You’ve got to actually sit there and do it, it can’t just be about the experience. Lots of people have fantastic experiences in life, but don’t have any inclination to put pen to paper.”

“Most people make art and movies as a job and if a lot of people go to see it they make money and that is their sign of success. I am not making judgment here, but their goal is strictly business-oriented. I don't do this as a business.”

“I knew what felt instinctively right for me, and I pursued that throughout my entire career. It’s the way I live; it’s the way I work. Everything that I’ve done and everything that I have is an extension of my personal taste.”

“I think it’s really important to not be afraid of failure and to push yourself to try things and jump in the cold water.”

“Filmmaking is never anything less than a beautiful gift. I've been doing this forever, and as hard as it may be, it's never let me down. I have such a will to make these movies!”

“If I want to make a movie and I can at 62, I will. But I want to leave the ring triumphant. I want this guy, this guy you see right now, I want him to be the guy who makes the movies, not the autumn dude.”

“I’m 80 years old now, and little by little over your lifetime you begin to understand things that you didn’t understand earlier.”

“I do not consider architecture as art, nor do I consider architects to be artists. However, I do have a strong desire to improve the purity of my expression and put a strong message into my architecture so that I can call it art!”

“There’s only one of you in the world. No one else is like you and that's a superpower.”

“We are consumed with existence, mortgages, jobs, cars, houses. It is nice to allow the imagination room to breathe again and see life as something that is spectacular and magic.”

“We have such a short time on this earth, and when you give that opportunity to somebody younger, and they pass it on to the next generation… That’s real success.”

“The game of basketball means everything. This is love. Definitely love. I had to practice and I had to make sacrifices, but basketball has given me so much.”

“I’ve learned that with time also comes pleasure: the pleasure of creating but also upholding the legacy that’s been passed down to me.”

“What I am looking for in this world is a sense of not feeling alone, and that’s one of the greatest gifts you can give to another person. I hope that my work does that. I hope that when people leave the theater they feel less alone.”

“I thought for a long time as the business grew, “Is this something I want to do for the rest of my life?” And I knew it was not. When I left Calvin Klein, I had done almost everything I wanted to do in terms of creation of products. And re-doing was less fun.”

“Art is something that you do – you can't not do it. If I made money doing it, I would do it; if I didn't make any money, I would do it.”

“I think a big part of writing comes out of an attempt to understand yourself. I just always felt whole when I was writing. I felt this kind of beautiful privacy that I never felt in any other way.”

“It’s everything you need, but nothing extra. It’s what's essential. It’s a minimum state which you achieve when you can't add or subtract… It’s sort of this perfect state, that’s what I'm looking for.”

“I think for me in my life, the most useful thing that I aspire to be is just being as self-aware and as honest with myself as possible. I think if you’re doing that then probably everything else will follow.”

“After winning an Oscar, there’s an alertness to what you’re thinking or doing or saying. I feel like there’s an aliveness to the experience that wasn’t as attuned previously.”

“It's important for a novelist to use the imagination like a musician, a composer or a painter would, in a kind of non-logical way. I think it’s very important for me to not just become a kind of intellectual writer.”

“I don’t want to continue to do what I did when I was 20. I would like to continue to develop myself .”

“If I pass away one day, I am happy because I tried to do my best. My sport allowed me to do so much.”

“Art is about finding creativity in the normal gutter next to you. To see the potential in something where there is no potential in terms of how society sees it is often where art or creativity is a great tool. It’s about making the impossible possible.”

“You better make every moment count. Live your life now; start in the morning. You mustn’t sit around waiting to die.”

“It’s the rollercoaster ride of doing something creative: when it goes well and you enjoy the process then it’s a high and you just want to keep on doing it.”

“I believe anyway that the prime-time for every work of art exists in the time in which it was done. After that it’s transformation, continuous transformation.”

“My goal when I’m in front of an audience is to perform the piece and fill it with meaning. On stage, I concentrate on rationality and empathy, since the singer must feel a certain amount of emotion, but not too much.”