I recently read “The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing” by Adam Moss. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. (It’s an interview book, so the name of the person who said them appears underlined above the quote.) If you like the quotes, buy the book here.
“Art happens when instinct meets rigor.” (8)
“Regardless of genres, creative paths look similar.” (15)
“W. H. Auden wrote, “When a successful author, analyzes the reasons for his success, he generally underestimates the talent he was born with, and overestimates his skill in employing it.” James Baldwin thought otherwise: “Tal-ent is insignificant…. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”” (15)
“Being an artist is much more like being a carpenter than like being God..” said the theater composer John Kander (he made this comment when he was ninety-six, so he’d had a long time to think about it). “What we do is a craft. I mean you can have a great inner talent and a lot of people do, but without craft it’s very hard for the talent to emerge.’” (15)
“Along the way, there is making and destroying, self-sabotage, doubt and despair, but the unifying fact of this book is that successful creators do not give up, even when the thwarting seems insurmountable. If this book has a plot, overcoming these thwarts was it. (How stubborn they all were! And, fundamentally, though they would rarely admit it, optimistic-deep down they believed the work would emerge, even if it would require a lot of torture to get there.)” (16)
Eric Fishl:
“Richard Artschwager was overworking a painting. He decided to watch TV and only go into his studio to paint during commercials.
That gave him about two minutes at a time to work. He said it took him most of the afternoon soaps but eventually he got past whatever it was that was holding him back.”
Tony Kushner
“I write in longhand. And then I type it. I always do that. So tha toy first draft is really my second draft. And if anybody looks at your ‘first’ draft, it’s not going to be as bad as your first. It gives you permission to be a terrible stupid idiot.” (42)
“Playwriting sometimes seems reducible to a loci equation – a series of hypotheticals: If I want to connect X character with Y character, what would happen?” (45)
Roz Chast
“So maybe if you feel that you’re not going to make people happy no matter how hard you tried, you might as well do what you want to do, because they’re not going to be happy anyway.” (52)
Michael Cunningham
“By then I had written enough to know that most of the time you get to a certain point in a book you want to give it up. And to write another book that won’t cause me the same trouble. And it does. You just end up stuck all over again.
So you might as well stay with the thing.” (60)
“You always have a better book in mind than you’re able to write. And one of the things you have to be able to do, if you’re going to write novels, is survive that discrepancy between the book you were able to write and the better book you imagined.” (61)
“It’s hard to separate talent from the almost spectrum-y degree of endless interest in something.” (61)
Sofia Coppola
“You’re born into a certain circumstance, and what you make out of it is who you are.” (76)
Thomas Bartlett
“I lean towards thinking it’s innate. We are blind to our own essence, you know? And one of the things I try to do as a producer is to get people to do what comes to them the most naturally, because people underestimate that thing about themselves.”
Twyla Tharp
“I asked if she allows for their suggestions. Tharp said, “If they’re clever, they don’t ask. They just do it and hope you won’t notice… but you do. And you say, ‘Well, that actually is a good idea!’ Because you have to keep them around….” (144)
“The avant-garde is basically, fuck you. It’s icy and isolated and very privileged in its attitude. Just because it’s inaccessible, is it better art? I don’t know about that.” (144)
“Often I go back and redo the beginning, because though you may think you know where you’re going, it’s probably going to end up differently. And I find that it’s valuable to let it evolve and then go back
and take off that fake beginning.” (145)
“AM: How important is the beginning?
TT: You have thirty seconds. Thirty seconds before people are either bored or they love you. You can win them later, but it’s going to be harder.” (145)
“AM: How do you think about editing your work?
TT: Editing means, how much objectivity do you have really? How much can you disassociate from your own bias? How much can you disassociate yourself from the wish fulfillment component that is involved in work of all sorts? You’ve got to become not you.” (145)
David Mandel
“If the story isn’t working, you can papier-mâché over it with as many jokes as you want. But at the end of the day, it won’t work.” (166)
“He finally realized that plotting the right developments int he right sequence with funny jokes in between wasn’t enough. Veep’s mojo lay in its pace and density… There was a lack of chaos. It was almost painfully logical… But what it took was almost taking the scenes and mushing them together because there wasn’t enough happening. And then suddenly it was Veep.” (167)
Ira Glass
“Really, you just have to work your way out of it. That’s the only way. You have to be rigorous, you have to be a soldier, you have to fight. It’s only by making a volume of work that you’ll be forced to confront what it is that you don’t know how to do, and learn to do it.” (267)
Dean Baquet and Tom Bodkin
“Editing is explicitly about distilling, but all art is a form of condensation.” (289)
Elizabeth Diller
“In any project, there are more ideas than there’s really space for. One idea is stronger without the other. The problem with a lot of people who do creative work is a tendency to oversaturate projects with too much.” (303)
Will Shortz
“Even the most unrestrained surrealist or experimental novelist is working within a grid of their own logic… I began to believe setting up that grid and solving problems within it was the primary act of creative process.” (332)
David Simon
“I looked at a couple of scripts. One thing I sensed was pacing. Every line has to justify itself. You don’t start at the beginning of scenes, you don’t end at the end, you come in late and leave early.” (370)
“You hear enough of these stories, you realize how often fortune plays into success.” (371)
“The most difficult question in TV writing is, Why are you doing the show? And if you can answer that question, you usually answer what the show should be. Whether you have a hit or not, if they wheel a fucking semitruck of money up to your driveway and say, ‘Please give us three more seasons of we don’t care what, just keep it coming, you have to be able to look at them and say, ‘I don’t have three seasons. I have other stories.’” (375)
George Saunders
“Generally I let myself do exactly wahat I felt like doing in the first draft. I don’t even worry about it. I just put it down. And then when I really start to destabilize is in revision.” (385)
Liked the quotes? Buy the book here.
