#243 | Special Edition: 10 Random Quotes That Will Inspire You to Create Boldly
Quick SUMMARY:
In this Special Edition episode, Douglas Vigliotti shares "10 Random Quotes That Will Inspire You to Create Boldly” from influential artists and writers like Leonard Bernstein, Francis Ford Coppola, and Jerry Seinfeld. Vigliotti discusses their relevance to the creative process and emphasizes embracing creativity, persistence, and authenticity. The episode aims to inspire listeners to pursue their creative passions boldly.
Listen to the episode:
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TOPICS COVERED IN the EPISODE:
Introduction to Special Edition (00:09) - Douglas introduces a special edition episode featuring ten quotes to inspire creativity.
New Book Announcement (00:40) - He mentions his new book, "Aristotle for Novelists," and invites listeners to visit the website.
Note-Taking Habit (01:19) - Douglas shares his habit of taking notes and collecting quotes from various media.
Quote 1: Steve Guttenberg (02:33) - Guttenberg discusses the ruthless nature of show business through a humorous anecdote.
Quote 2: Francis Ford Coppola (03:54) - Coppola emphasizes that not everyone will appreciate bold creativity, paired with Rubin's insights.
Quote 3: Rick Rubin (04:56) - Rubin highlights how initial dislike can lead to appreciation for groundbreaking work.
Quote 4: Leonard Bernstein (06:35) - Bernstein states that art provokes questions rather than providing answers, emphasizing artistic tension.
Quote 5: Willem Dafoe (07:55) - Dafoe remarks that the work itself is what sustains an artist, not financial rewards.
Quote 6: George Pelecanos (09:13) - Pelecanos critiques audience demands, using pornography as a metaphor for storytelling constraints.
Quote 7: David Geffen (10:42) - Geffen reflects on self-invention and the importance of dreaming big in personal reinvention.
Quote 8: Derek Sivers (11:16) - Sivers asserts that mastery is earned through hard work, unaffected by wealth or privilege.
Quote 9: Tom Wolfe (12:04) - Wolfe suggests that receiving hate is an indicator of pushing artistic boundaries.
Quote 10: Jerry Seinfeld (12:54) - Seinfeld shares advice on embracing failure in creative endeavors to maintain authenticity.
Bonus Quote: David Chase (13:09) - Chase discusses the persistence needed in the creative process before achieving success.
Conclusion and Call to Action (14:17) - Douglas wraps up the episode, encouraging subscriptions and sharing thoughts on the podcast.
READ THE TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome back to “Books for Men”, a podcast to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. So this week I am moving away from the movie verse novel segment to end the month, and I'm going to be doing a special edition that is titled “10 Random Quotes that Will Inspire You to Create Boldly”. And I will tell you why I decided to do this episode in just a moment. But first, I wanted to remind you about my new book that is out, Aristotle for Novelists: 14 Timeless Principles on the Art of Story”. If you are interested in learning more, all you have to do is visit the website AristotleforNovelists.com. All right, so let's pivot back to this special edition episode, which again is titled “10 Random Quotes that Will Inspire You to Create Boldly”. So, one of the things about me is that I take notes pretty incessantly throughout the day. So not just when I read, but also as I engage with pretty much everything. Listen to podcasts, watch movies, and I'm always jotting down quotes and little anecdotes and things that I encounter because I want to remember them.
01:19 - And so I have this huge running list of quotes and notes and all this stuff. Not just, like I said, from books, but also from all different types of media. Recently, I embarked on a large project to organize these notes and consolidate some things. During that time, I came across the ten random quotes that I'm going to share with you. And so they are about the creative life, creative process, our creativity, and perhaps most importantly, I don't want you to lose sight of the process in which these quotes were grabbed out of the ether, so to speak. I literally stopped in real time to write these quotes down in my notebook, and sometimes even rewinding a podcast or stopping a documentary or something of that nature. So they definitely made a mark on me at the time. And if I'm sharing them with you now, obviously, I still think there is a lot of relevance for them. I wouldn't say they're all extremely quotable lines. You know, they don't fit nicely onto an Instagram window necessarily, although some probably do.
02:33 - But nonetheless, they are impactful and I think that they will inspire you. Having said that, let's jump right into quote number one. So it comes from Steve Guttenberg, who of course, is an actor. He was more prominent in the 80s and 90s. I always think of him in “Police Academy” or the Police Academies. There were multiple of them. Interestingly, I think this plays into the quote that I'm going to share with you. So, he was on the Craig Ferguson podcast. He's talking about the cycle of show business as it was taught to him by Paul Newman. And so he says the five stages of show business are. “Who is Steve Guttenberg? Get me a Steve Guttenberg. I want a Steve Guttenberg-type. I want a young Steve Guttenberg in the last stage. Who is Steve Guttenberg?” And I just thought this was such a funny quote, an anecdote, because it shows the ruthless nature of show business. And in many respects, I think this is the same thing in a lot of careers where you go from a complete unknown to someone really wanting to work with you, to somebody wanting a version of you.
03:54 - To you aging out and someone wanting a young version of you. And then finally becoming dust, essentially. And nobody knows who you are. It just feels so human to me. Quote number two comes from Francis Ford Coppola from “Tetragrammaton”, which is Rick Rubin's podcast, and it's short. He says, “When you go out on a ledge, you have to accept that not everyone is going to like it. And it may take time.” And instead of elaborating on that, I'm going to pair it with quote number three, which is from Rick Rubin. And he says, “It's the people you first see. And you might not like that you come to like because you don't understand them at first. Those are the ones that change the world.” And so the reason why I combined both of these is specifically because Francis Ford Coppola is one of those people who changed the world, at least in a cinematic sense, both with, “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now”, both being incredibly daring films at the time. And if you've read anything about “The Godfather”, then you know how incredibly daunting the task was to actually get that project made and created in the fashion that it was.
05:21 - But I think that there's something to this being that when you see something new or a little different, you don't have a reference point for it. And because you don't have a reference point for it, you may actually push that thing away rather than embrace it, which is a totally normal experience. I have this experience all the time. When I'm trying to find new music, it often takes a few listens for me to really grasp the song or songs that I'm listening to. Movies and books, of course, are a little bit of a different thing, but I always appreciate the person who's trying to do it differently, even if it doesn't land for me. Quote number four comes from the composer Leonard Bernstein, and I actually pulled this from the opening shot of the movie that just came out about his life, done by Bradley Cooper. “Maestro”, I believe it was called. The quote says, “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them, and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.”
06:35 - I think this is just a really beautiful idea. Juxtaposition is central to what makes art interesting. At least in my eyes. And this quote really hinges On that idea in an effort to keep this moving along, let's go on to quote number five. And it comes from Willem Dafoe from his interview on “Armchair Expert”, which, of course, is the really popular podcast of Dax Shepard and Monica Padman. He says, “The work will sustain you, the money will not.” And hearing this come from such an accomplished actor, it hit particularly hard for me. It's really just an ode to Process and understanding that if you have the work and you love the work, then you should be really grateful for it because that's all you need to keep on going. Quote number six is more of a passage, I would say, and it comes from someone who I've featured on this podcast before, George Pelecanos in his book “Owning Up”. I will link that episode in the show notes for Easy access. But in 2019, he had an article done on him by the New York Times right around when his show, “The Deuce” was concluding, I believe.
07:55 - So that show aired from 2017 to 2019. I only know because it's one of my favorite shows of all time. He created it with David Simon, and he had this quote to say in that article, “Somebody much smarter than me described the audience as a child. It sounds like I'm being arrogant, but if you give the audience what they say they want, they'll always want ice cream. They'll want exactly what they've seen in the past and more of it. Well, in pornography, that was incredibly destructive because pornography is effectively a vehicle for male gratification in the most basic way. So if you ask men what they want from porn, that last thing they're going to say is, I want character. I want story. I want it to have a point. Of course not. So in some ways, porn is this hyperbolic metaphor for what happens anytime the audience dictates terms and the storyteller is not left to their own devices.” I fucking love this quote for so many reasons. Sorry for the language. Don't swear too much on the podcast, but I do.
09:13 - And just for some more context. The show “The Deuce” centers around the evolution of the porn industry starting on 42nd Street in New York City. The deuce. It's an extremely well-done show, despite its graphic and what could be, for some people, uncomfortable nature. It's done extremely tastefully, at least in my eyes. And you really feel for this community of people that you follow over three seasons. The storytelling is just second to none. It's why it's one of my favorite shows anyway. Quote number seven. It comes from David Geffen, and I pulled this off of his documentary. It's the opening shot or the opening quote. He's speaking to the camera, and he says, “I've always thought that each person invented himself for whatever reasons, through whatever circumstances, through whatever he has gone through, that we are each a figment of our imagination, and some people have a greater ability to imagine than others.” Tough pill to swallow because it makes you really look at yourself in the mirror and say, how big am I dreaming? Maybe you don't want to dream that big, but I think the difference maker for most people is this reinvention and ability to see themselves as something much bigger than they are.
10:42 - Quote number eight comes from Derek Sivers. He's like a technology guy. He's written some small non-fiction books, and this one comes from his book “How to Live”. He writes, “Mastery is the best goal because the rich can't buy it. The impatient can't rush it. The privileged can't inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work.” What's better and more inspiring than that? Quote number nine comes from Tom Wolfe in his documentary “Radical Wolfe”, and he was talking to his daughter about negative reviews, of which he received many in his career. And he had this short, quippy thing to say to her. “You're nobody until somebody hates you on its face.” I don't know if that's necessarily true, but I do think that hating something is just as interesting as loving it. And when you have people who hate you just as much as love you, it means you are really pushing the boundaries. And to me, that is the more interesting art in the world. The things that go so far in one direction that force you to say, I love that, or I hate that.
12:04 - It's what Rick Rubin might say as dividing the audience in quote number ten comes from Jerry Seinfeld, who also has been featured on this podcast, and I will link that episode in the show notes for easy access. He was on “Blocks with Neil Brennan”, a podcast, and he told him this story about what David Letterman told him when he got his opportunity to create “Seinfeld” for NBC, and what Letterman told him was, “Just make sure you fail doing exactly what you want to do.” The reason why he said that is to expect failure because so many creative projects don't become hits. And if you're going to fail, then you might as well do it the way you want to do it. Because if you make concessions and you do it someone else's way and it fails, you're never going to be able to live with yourself. And I found this to just be the most ingenious piece of advice. Seinfeld is full of great practical and pragmatic wisdom and advice. I have tons of quotes from him in my notes.
13:09 - And actually, since you made it this far, I will give you one bonus quote. It's not awfully quippy, but it delivers a major point, I would say, and it builds off of the last quote that I just shared with you. It's from David Chase, the showrunner of “The Sopranos”, and he was speaking on all of the rejection he received prior to creating what I consider one of the greatest pieces of art in the 21st century, “The Sopranos”. But he had this to say: “I had done five, six, seven of these things. And I started to think, what the fuck?” And of course, he's talking about all of his previous TV pilots that he created that nobody wanted anything to do with. And this all obviously came before his major success with The Sopranos. I always love stories like this. I think they dispel this commonly held belief that talent is everything when in actuality, talent is just table stakes. And the thing that's really in short supply is persistence, commitment and endurance.
14:17 - And I think you will find in the creative arts that this is actually a pretty common arc. It's actually more the norm than the rarity. So I think this is a good place to call it quits. I hope you enjoyed the ten random quotes if you did. I want to remind you to please click subscribe on whatever podcast platform you're listening to this on. It goes a long way in getting this podcast in front of more eyeballs and ears and inspiring more men to read. If you want to share what you thought about this podcast or the podcast more broadly, there are two ways that you can connect with me, either on Instagram @DouglasVigliotti. It's the only social media that I have or via my website: DouglasVigliotti.com. As I mentioned at the top of this episode, I do have a new book out called “Aristotle for Novelists”, and if you're interested in learning more about that, all you have to do is visit the website AristotleforNovelists.com. All of these links will be in the show notes. And last but not least, I wanted to thank you so much for listening. If you want more information on this podcast specifically, which includes signing up for the monthly newsletter, then all you have to do is head over to the website BooksforMen.org.
